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Aug. 4, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
49:55
Episode 1081 Scott Adams: The Difference Between Mental Illness and an Opinion on Coronavirus are Shrinking, Biden Decomposes, Axios, More

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Good morning, everybody.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best time of the day.
Except for any other times that I come on Periscope, which is the other best time of the day.
And what better way to get the day going?
We've got all kinds of fun stuff to talk about.
Sure, there are tragedies in the world, but you can't spend all your time thinking about tragedy.
Sometimes you've got to get a little relief.
You've got to give your brain a break.
That's why you're here. To give your brain a break.
We're going to talk about the fun and stupid and funny parts of the world.
But first, in order to enjoy it fully, I recommend that you find yourself a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or 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 hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go! Ah.
It feels as though there's still the same amount of stupidity in the world, but it's not bothering me as much.
That's what the simultaneous sip does for you.
Yeah. Let's talk about some fun things.
There's a company that has developed a face mask that can translate into other languages when you talk.
How cool is that?
Don't you want a face mask that can translate into other languages while you talk?
I would never talk English again.
I'd just walk around talking other languages and see if other people knew who I was.
But I think this mask that can translate into other languages probably is the beginning of the cyborg age where we just cover up all of this stuff, all this head stuff.
You know, once you've got something over your eyes, which will be your augmented reality glasses, you've got something shoved in your ears, which will clearly be your hearing devices, you've got some kind of a hat because of the sun, you've got some sunscreen on you, which in a way is sort of a chemical modification, and then you've got your face mask on, you're good to go.
Full Android capability.
The other thing I would like to see is, I'd like to see a mask With echo cancellation.
So that I can have a conversation with my mask on that only goes through my phone and nobody around me can hear it, even if they're sitting right next to me.
Is that possible? Probably not, but I'd like to have it.
And how about a mask that lets you speak commands into the mask to operate anything that's voice controlled, including your phone?
Yes. Full cyborg.
It's coming. Well, yesterday the President announced that they would make permanent the telehealth regulations.
I guess they made it during the pandemic, which we're still in.
They made the telehealth legal across state lines.
There may have been some other things that they did.
But now that's permanent.
Now, how hard would it have been...
To make telehealth permanent across state lines if we had not had a pandemic.
It hadn't happened yet.
It was the most obvious thing you could ever do.
I mean, it's obviously good for the public.
It's obviously going to lower health care costs.
It's obviously going to make health care more available.
But without the pandemic and the opportunity that a crisis created, I don't know if it would have happened.
Or at least not so soon.
It's a pretty big deal.
So you see the president now sort of assembling the parts of something that would look sort of like a healthcare, I don't want to call it a plan, but more of a healthcare series of initiatives and executive orders and whatnot that are all designed collectively to create more competition, more transparency.
And fewer regulations.
Now, if you said to me, can we get to universal healthcare or something like it by just taxing everybody, I'd say, I don't know.
Sounds pretty expensive.
Plus, it might not ever pass.
But can we lower the cost of healthcare by making it a more competitive industry, by doing a variety of things and just remove competitive roadblocks?
To which I say, apparently so.
Apparently so. I don't know that this gets us to full coverage, but if you don't get the cost of healthcare down, how could you ever talk about covering everybody?
Let me put it in stark terms.
Prior to the pandemic, and let's say we get back to there in a year or so, I think something like 9% of the public was not covered by healthcare.
And although this next thing I'm going to say doesn't make perfect sense, it just gives you a size of magnitude, that's all I'm trying to do.
If we could cut the cost of healthcare by 20% for everybody, that kind of, in just a conceptual way, frees up money that would be enough to cover everybody.
Now, if I save money on my healthcare, that doesn't mean I'm going to pay more taxes to cover somebody else, but you can see that It is probably more important to bring the total cost of healthcare down first to have any chance of covering everybody.
And I do think we should cover everybody.
Let me ask you this.
You know, there's a big question about whether illegal...
Illegal citizens.
In other words, undocumented.
There's a conversation about whether undocumented people should get free health care, because apparently they can walk into the emergency room and get it.
And I suppose if they don't have any health insurance, then maybe the hospital doesn't get paid.
So what if there was some kind of deal where any kind of undocumented person who got health care had to give a DNA sample?
And the DNA sample, you could anonymize it, so you don't necessarily have to know it came from this person.
Oh, but maybe you do. Yeah, let's say you do.
You do know where it came from.
And let's say that's the cost of free healthcare.
Yeah, we'll give you free healthcare, but we've got to get a sample of your DNA. Now, there would be two benefits from that.
One, the crime from, well, the crime in general, It would be much reduced by the more DNA we have of people.
But also, if we have massive DNA samples, we can find who is more or less susceptible to coronavirus.
Who is more or less susceptible to this or that.
So the healthcare outcomes...
This is just pure speculation.
I won't make this a claim.
It's just something to think about.
Is the opportunity for improving not only crime solutions, but health care?
Is it big enough that if you had such a large group of DNA that you were collecting and they were non-citizens, but it was just sort of their part?
In a sense, they would give up privacy in this one way.
In return for helping the outcomes of all the other undocumented immigrants, because whatever health outcomes were good for the country and the world would be good for everybody.
I'll just put it out there.
Because, you know, you don't always have to pay money for a service.
Perhaps you could pay in terms of your DNA. Because it does have a pretty, pretty large economic value, but obviously you're not going to give it up unless you have to.
Or unless you volunteer to.
Just put it out there.
I was watching a clip.
Do you remember when Biden had this televised event where he just talked to Obama?
So it was just Obama and Biden together having a conversation for a campaign event.
And I was listening to that yesterday.
One of the things that Obama said was so telling...
Just listen to this.
I wrote it down.
I think I got it approximately right.
And Obama said, the thing I'm confident about is your heart.
So he was talking to Biden.
The thing I'm confident about is your heart.
Now that's an interesting choice of words.
And I think I've told some of you before that hypnotists learn that people reveal their hidden thoughts in their choice of words.
So if you look at the choice of words as opposed to what the sentence says, you can often get an opposite meaning from what the choice of words were.
In this case, can you think of any situation in which Obama was confident in general about Biden?
Just confident about everything.
Confident about his decision making, confident about his health, confident about his policies, confident about his heart.
Would he use this choice of words?
The thing I'm confident about is your heart.
Because I think if I were confident about everything, I'd say something like, you know, I've never been more confident in a candidate to be the right choice.
Right? You'd say something like that.
I feel like Obama is signaling as clearly as you can that he's not confident in Biden's brain.
That seems really, really clear.
If you read between the lines.
Of course, we can't know we're right, but I know I'm right.
Isn't that the way?
The American way is to have no way to know that you're right, but you still feel completely confident.
Just the same. You should adjust your confidence and my confidence by knowing that I couldn't know what anybody's thinking.
I can't read his mind.
But it is a generally useful thing to look at choice of words.
And you can definitely beat the averages if you're guessing that you know what's going on.
All right. The American Journal of Political Science published a correction.
So that's not too unusual, right?
I think half of published papers end up not being true.
So they published a correction this year saying that a paper from 2012...
Oh, that was a long time ago. 2012...
Has an error. And here's what the error was.
They had done a study and they decided that conservatives were ranked higher on psychoticism.
Now, I'm not sure exactly what psychoticism is, but it doesn't sound good.
And it turns out that when somebody reviewed their work, they had some kind of a math or analytical error, and it was actually the opposite.
So since 2012, there have been 45 different citations and articles or whatever saying that conservatives have been shown to have higher psychoticism, but they had actually just flipped it.
It was actually liberals who had more psychoticism.
And since 2012, that study has been used as something that tells you something is true.
It was just reversed. This is a subset of my theory that all data are wrong.
Now, I like to say all data is wrong, because as a professional writer, I'm one of the people who is responsible for putting things into common usage.
Proper English, data is plural, so you'd say the data are wrong.
Just sounds like a douchebag.
I'm sorry, you just sound like a douchebag when you say the data are wrong.
If you say the data is wrong, you don't sound like a douchebag, but you are technically incorrect.
Now it's my responsibility, as I said as a professional writer, to give cover to the rest of you.
So this professional writer is going to start saying the data is wrong, because it just sounds better.
I'm sorry, it just sounds better.
And I get to make that choice.
You get to tell me I'm wrong, but just understand I'm doing it intentionally.
That rule has to change.
So, I'll go first.
The data is wrong.
Anyway, my point was, it's basically true that all of our data for public decisions is wrong.
Let me say that again.
It's essentially true that all of the data we use For public decisions is wrong.
And not just wrong in a little way.
Wrong as in the reverse.
Wrong as in it makes you look in the entirely wrong planet for a solution.
I mean wrong in the most fundamental way anything could get wrong.
And it's pretty much everything.
Almost everything.
And you keep that frame in mind because we're coming from a world only months ago where we thought Okay, obviously, sometimes data is wrong.
But most of the time, smart people are looking at it, and the critics have looked at it, and there's peer review, and you've got respected journalists.
The New York Times are reporting it.
So, yeah, I get it.
Sometimes information can be wrong.
But not most of the time.
I mean, most of the time is right.
Right? No.
It's wrong all the time.
It's always wrong. And until you realize that the data is always wrong for public decisions.
Sometimes for science, too.
But for the public decisions, it's always wrong all the time.
And the reason is that you never see data unless it gets filtered through a person.
And that person is either incapable or unwilling to tell you the truth, but they will certainly tell you what they want you to believe.
And if you hear my dog sleep barking, that's what that little yelping is.
So just keep that in mind.
It's very similar to the hypnotist inversion, if I could call it that.
When I first took hypnosis, I went into the class assuming a similar thing, which is that 90% of the time people are rational.
And they're using their logical facilities.
And maybe 10% of the time, there's maybe one issue that will make one of us crazy.
But in general, we're these rational, clear-thinking people.
Just sometimes we get a little crazy.
Once you learn hypnosis, you realize it's the reverse.
That we're 90% irrational.
And that little speck of time that we're rational, it's only because we don't care about it.
We're only rational when we don't care.
It's just an emotion-free decision.
Oh yeah, 2 plus 2 does equal 4.
I'll take 4. So just keep that in mind, that the data is always wrong.
And we learned that in 2020, but it's a tough lesson.
We'll talk more about that in a minute.
I've decided that it's getting harder and harder to treat obvious mental illness as an opinion.
The Antifa people, we talked about this before, there may be some people who are technically sane, but the people getting arrested, the troublemakers, a lot of the most active, that's just mental illness.
Can we stop saying that they have a different political opinion?
Can we stop saying they have a plan?
Chaos and anarchy are not really a plan.
That's mental illness.
Until somebody can describe how anarchy gets you to a better place for anybody, including the anarchist, it's not really a difference of opinion.
It's just mental illness.
And there's sort of a temporary version of this that's Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I don't think we have the luxury of thinking of Trump Derangement Syndrome anymore As just a difference of political opinion.
It really isn't.
There's something else going on.
Now that doesn't mean that those people who have Trump derangement syndrome have an organic mental problem, but they might have a mental problem in the same way that PTSD can scramble your brain, the same way that Some kind of fear, some abuse. I guess that gets to PTSD. But the point is that your lived experience can make you crazy about some topics.
And I really think that when we talk about this as differences of political opinion, or differences in who can analyze things better, or who has better data, which isn't really a thing, I think that we just do a disservice because we're just looking in the wrong place.
These are genuine mental health problems.
And I just think it helps to think of it that way.
I feel a bit angry at all the people who know what President Trump should be doing and the plan that he should be implementing that would fix all this coronavirus stuff.
Because according to the Democrats, there is such a thing as a plan That they have in their minds as the standard of how to do it right.
And if only the president would use that plan that's in their heads, things would be a lot better.
And why don't they tell us the plan?
Now you say to yourself, Scott, Scott, Scott, they have.
In so many ways, look at this link.
And then you'll look at the link and it'll be, some other country had a better result.
So therefore, if we do what that other country did, we'll get the same result.
If you think that, you should not make decisions in public.
Because all the other countries are so fundamentally different in so many different ways, we have no idea what worked and didn't work.
None. We have no idea what worked.
We also don't know if their numbers are true, and we also don't know how the game ends, because we're at halftime.
Did Australia really, really do a great job on the coronavirus?
Hard to say, because they're having a major flare-up right now.
If you have a flare-up, doesn't that mean you didn't do a good job?
Or does that mean you did do a good job because you only had one flare-up?
And now if they tamp this back down, you'll say, oh, okay, good job again.
How do you even evaluate these things?
Because if we don't have a way to stop the virus, there's no plan for That looks anything like something that could work besides what we're doing, which is to keep the economy healthy and take our losses, but try to keep them as low as possible.
So every time you hear somebody say, why doesn't the president have a plan?
First of all, they're lying, because the plan is crystal clear.
I've explained it many times.
Every part of the plan is public and publicized.
It's the most... Clear plan you could ever have.
Now, of course, there are discussions about opening up the schools, etc., but the federal government is very clear.
You can't say that the federal government, but Trump, doesn't know exactly what he wants.
He wants schools to open. We knew that we were trying to save the health care system from collapsing, and we succeeded.
And we knew that we were going to try to buy time until...
Vaccines are therapeutics.
And as long as we need an economy, we don't have the option of closing it.
Now let me explain to you what the Democrats seem to explain as their plan.
And I'll have to call in a Democrat to explain this.
Dale? Dale, can you come over here?
We want to learn about the Democrat plan.
For fixing everything?
Because we know that Mr.
Trump, he's doing everything wrong.
So, Dale, can you come over here and explain how to do it right?
Sure. Sure.
All you have to do is wear masks.
Well, Dale, that's it.
You just have to wear masks, as most people are wearing masks in all the places that seem to matter.
Well, maybe if the president wore a mask.
I don't think that's it.
That's it? That would be your plan?
Your plan would just be to be the president and wear a mask, and then everything would be okay?
No, no, no.
You'll also have to close the economy.
You've got to close the economy.
Okay, Dale, so if you close the economy, does that have any costs associated with it as well?
Dale, say something.
Would any people die if you crushed your economy in the long run?
Dale, Dale, say something.
No, we're talking, looking at the big picture.
We understand that too many people have died.
But I'm trying to understand your plan in which you close the economy.
Are there no costs associated with that in terms of Long-term well-being of the people and even lives?
Can you say more about that?
Dale, you're going to have to talk.
Say something. Say something on the topic of the economy closing and what that does to people's lives and their health, their mental health, and their ongoing well-being.
Can you please speak to that?
La-la-la-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la.
Should have wore masks.
Thank you, Dale.
Well, So we have this absurd situation which people who don't know how to compare anything, don't know how to analyze anything, are informing the public.
Let me give you an example.
So there's big news today.
Axios did an interview one-on-one with, I guess, Swan was talking to the president.
They had Two chairs apart from each other.
And there's one part of that that's getting a lot of play, which is the president shuffling some papers with some graphs and trying to make his case about the statistics.
Now, this did not go well.
If you saw the clip, I think you'd agree with me.
Didn't go well. Didn't go well for the President.
But here's what I would recommend.
Never put the President of the United States in a chair with no desk.
See, the no desk part is important.
Never put the President of the United States in a chair on camera and give him multiple pieces of paper With complicated data on it and ask him to speak to it.
Don't ever put the president in that position.
If the president had said, hey, can somebody print out, you know, those statistics?
So when I'm talking to this reporter, you should have said no and figured out something else to do.
Because let me tell you, this is not a good look.
I've got some data here about the rates and other countries.
Do not put your president in that situation.
Now, I'm sure if I knew the details, you probably wanted to be in that situation because you probably wanted the data in his hands.
But we don't want we the public I think I can speak for everybody in the public.
We, the public, don't want to see a journalist and a politician arguing about statistics.
Do you want to see that?
Because the journalist didn't understand the topic, you know, any more than a journalist would, and probably the journalist is still back in, let's say, January 2020 thinking, where the journalist imagined that the data Could be right, whatever the data said.
I think the journalist might have been under the impression that there's some kind of data that would be accurate.
That's not qualified to talk about data on TV. The president had more data than he needed and probably would have been better served by picking one or two statistics he could remember off the top of his head and just sticking to it, whatever those statistics are.
But shuffling the papers, don't ever do that again.
Now, if he had a desk in front of him where he could lay out his materials so there's no shuffling, then that's good.
Those are just notes to remind him how to talk.
But don't put him in a chair with no table and a bunch of papers in his hand.
My God, don't ever do that again.
That's my advice.
Alright. Did you see the...
So much to talk about today.
Have you noticed that writers can't tell the difference between an argument and an insult?
Have you seen that?
It looks like this.
If I say to a writer, let's say on Twitter, if I say something like, what should Trump do differently with this coronavirus?
What should be a better plan than what's happening now?
You'll get some kind of answer like that.
Well, he's an unstable authoritarian who denies science.
To which I think, I think that's just an insult.
That didn't really quite address my question.
And I think part two is, you've got to get rid of Trump and get somebody who is not one of those unstable authoritarian science deniers, which, of course, he isn't.
And I don't know if they can tell the difference.
And I just quoted, by the way, Carl Bernstein.
So they're trotting out the worse than Watergate guy who just comes out to say things are worse than Watergate or that Trump is Nixon.
And it is just so funny when that guy comes out.
He used to bother me, but now it's so funny.
It's like, ah, they got Carl Bernstein out to say it's worse than Watergate.
Every month or so you can renew that play.
Alright. Here's an idea that someone on Twitter suggested that would solve the pandemic.
And it goes like this.
We will take the technology we don't have.
Oh. Okay.
I guess that's hard.
We'll take the technology that doesn't exist.
Okay. But imagine it did.
So I'm...
I'm just wading into this, so I don't have enough information on this, but the claim is this, that if you did less accurate testing, but more of it, especially if you can get instant or near instant answers, you can imagine a situation where kids going into school swab something and then look at it, and it either tells them they have coronavirus or not, but it wouldn't be super accurate.
Not as good as a real clinical test.
And the claim is that although they would not be super accurate, they would be sort of accurate-ish enough that you would catch enough cases that you would at least get the R value, the spread value below 1, and then you'd have something there.
And so my question is, does there exist...
Such tests, which, although not perfect, are good enough and cheap enough that you could test for a dollar and have an answer in a minute or five minutes or something.
Do those exist? Because I get a lot of, yeah, don't worry about the false negatives and don't worry about the false positives.
The idea is that if the inaccurate tests pick up something, you could then do an accurate test to confirm.
But at the very least, you'd say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we might have a problem with this class, so you guys go home until we sort it out.
So you could imagine...
Somebody's saying, yes, just use saliva.
So you could imagine that if these tests existed, if they were cheap, if they were widespread, if everybody tested once a day no matter what, you could get on top of it.
But it feels like a magical thinking solution.
Because I don't think we have tests like that.
I would love to see something from the president or the task force telling us how close we are to anything like that.
Or any kind of news coverage of a company that's making something like that.
Now, the cousin to that is doing group testing.
So that would be if everybody in the class spit into something or swabbed something.
And then you take the entire class and test them as a group.
If you find nobody in the class has it, well, you're done.
But if you find that somebody in the class has it, then you can test them individually.
So you can get big groups of people with one test, so long as it ends up being negative.
So that's another path.
But I believe our experts are probably up to date on all this stuff, and if this were practical, I have confidence That somebody like Birx or Fauci or somebody would be saying, hey, let's do all these tests.
Alright, so I don't think it's practical.
But I wonder how far we are from it.
Here's an argument that I heard yesterday from somebody far, far smarter than I am.
Far, far smarter.
And when I hear things that are sort of above my brain's pay grade...
I like to run it by you because some of you can handle that stuff.
And it goes like this. So we've got...
There are two types of hydroxychloroquine tests that we know of.
There are really well-done tests that test the wrong stuff.
And then there were lower-quality tests that test something closer to the right thing, which is early use and then all three drugs with the zinc and azithromycin, etc.
Now, the argument is that the ones that are really good tests show that hydroxychloroquine is not effective.
But, since they tested the wrong stuff, that doesn't really tell us much.
They tested people who were hospitalized, didn't give them all three drugs, gave them too much, so those tests didn't have much value.
But what about all the tests, I think there's 65 of them and growing, probably more by now, of tests that were low quality, But it seemed to indicate that hydroxychloroquine works.
If you saw one test that was low quality, meaning it's not a confirmation, but it showed hydroxychloroquine works, what would be your rational opinion of that?
Your rational opinion should be, one study.
It's like a coin flip, because half of studies are wrong.
Not reproducible. So, really, I don't know if I know anything.
It's like a coin flip. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.
But suppose you had 65 tests and a whole bunch of different ways of looking at it, and all the tests were different, but by coincidence, they had, by a great majority, maybe not every one, but by a large majority, they seemed to show it works.
And the argument is this, and I'll see if I can present it right.
If you do one test that's not reliable on hydroxychloroquine, there might be several different reasons why it's wrong.
If you do 65 tests, you've got a whole bunch of different ways that each of those tests will be wrong.
And the speculation is, the smarter person says, is that enough to tell you something?
And that's what I'm going to present to you, is it?
Because each of these tests, no matter what their variables were or how they looked at it, seem to indicate the same direction, that there's some effect.
But given that they're all flawed, but here's the key.
They're all flawed, but they're all different takes.
In other words, they did a different thing.
If all the people doing different things individually were not reliable, but by coincidence they all seemed to show some effect, Or most of them.
Does that tell you something?
And there are smart people who say, yeah, that does tell you something.
It's certainly enough to give it a try, given that it's inexpensive and won't kill you.
So, I put that out there.
Is that a reasonable approach?
Alright. By now, most of you have seen the new George Floyd body cam video.
And of course it's, you know, two movies on one screen situation.
Everybody's seeing what they want to see.
I would say at this point there isn't the slightest chance that the police officers will be charged with murder.
Or if they are, there isn't the slightest chance they'll be convicted of murder.
I think they've already been charged.
But when you see the video, it's just crystal clear That this was a horrible mistake.
Now, they could be guilty of, I don't know, not trying hard enough to revive him, of not following some procedure.
I don't know. Maybe.
But I'll tell you what it's not.
It's definitely not murder.
It's not even close.
And here's the kill shot.
If those police officers want to save a lot of money on lawyers, I can present their whole case for them.
It goes like this. George Floyd was saying, I can't breathe before he even got in the car, which is before he got on the ground, which is before they were on top of him.
His breathing difficulty...
He said directly.
He said it out loud and it's on video.
He was having breathing problems before any of the bad interactions encountered.
And if it's true that the fentanyl in him was three times the overdose amount, then he was going to die no matter what.
But... I would certainly question whether the police officers did enough to keep him alive once it was obvious he had some kind of a problem.
So that's certainly worth looking into, and I think that's really disturbing.
Part of what we saw in that video, or maybe it was a different one, is that one of the bystanders who saw George Floyd look like he was unconscious, one of the bystanders was screaming at the police to check his pulse.
Just screaming at the police, and the police were just ignoring him.
And the bystander was completely right.
He's saying, check his pulse, check his pulse.
You're not even checking his pulse.
And that, that has to be answered for.
Okay, that really needs an answer.
And if the police are, if there's some penalty for whatever that was about, I still have to hear their side of it, but whatever that was about, that's not good.
So, certainly the police officers are not in the clear, but it's really clear that they weren't out to murder anybody.
That much is completely obvious.
And I found that, this is my opinion, I think Black Lives Matter is completely discredited at this point.
Does it feel like that to you? Now, I'm not talking about black people, of course.
I'm just talking about Black Lives Matter, the movement that Isn't it totally discredited at this point?
Because it just seems ridiculous.
And it also is the lowest priority in the black community.
Now, if you tell me it's not, I'd say, oh, well, I see the problem.
How will the black community ever make progress if they can't tell the difference between their highest priority, which would be education, which would be getting rid of the teachers' unions, Which would basically make everything better, from economics to violence to health outcomes, just everything. Versus the police violence, which will affect X number of people, as tragic as it is, as much as we need to make that better, it's the smallest priority.
It's the smallest priority.
So how am I supposed to take serious, seriously, a group that says Black Lives Matter While they're making the entire country focus exclusively on the least important part of black lives.
That's exactly like black lives don't matter.
Because if I said to you, which of these is more like black lives matter?
Is it the one that does the thing that doesn't make any fucking difference?
Sorry, didn't slip down.
Or is it the thing that changes everything?
The thing that can really...
Fix things for generations to come, which would be education, which would be getting the teachers' unions out of the logjam, or creating the logjam, so that there would be competition so that the charter and other schools could actually teach people and that they could have good lives.
So I refuse to take BLM seriously until they take themselves seriously.
Until they can figure out what their top priority is and stop focusing on the smallest one, I'm not going to take you seriously, and I don't think you should either.
But, happy to help on the big problem, which is teachers unions.
Did you see the video of, there were some protesters, they were trying to make their way to the Seattle police chief's house, private house, and some citizens with a pickup truck and a very large gun, or more, stopped them and sent them back.
You have to watch it.
This is the bunny shot here.
One of the protesters on the video, when confronted with the armed citizens protecting the police, said, quote, we're peaceful.
You pointed a gun at my face.
And then the resident with the gun said, that's why you're peaceful.
That's why you're peaceful.
Because I got a gun at your head.
Now, how bad are things when the citizens are protecting the police?
That's literally what happened.
I'm not overstating that.
This was citizens protecting the police.
That's a crazy back upside down world.
Now this is the reason that I'm less concerned than a lot of people that this will spread to rural areas and spread into the suburbs.
This guy with the pickup truck That's why it won't spread into the suburbs.
Because it doesn't take many of those guys who just stand in the road with a weapon and say, how about we're done?
How about you're done here?
It doesn't take many of them for the spreading to stop.
And frankly, the people with the guns don't give a shit about the cities.
So the cities may be in trouble.
I guess Facebook just bought a whole bunch of property in New York City for Future operations.
So Facebook thinks New York City will be a good place to live.
It's not like the cities will go away.
I just don't think they'll ever be the same.
How about this?
How about that? That's all I've talked about today.
Alright. The best way to signal in public that you don't understand anything about the world...
is to compare how the United States is doing on the coronavirus to any other country or any other two or three countries.
So let me say this as clearly as I can so you don't make the same mistake.
If you think it means something to compare how the United States is doing with the coronavirus to any other country, whether they're doing better or worse, if you think it means something, You don't understand really anything about how the world works.
It doesn't mean anything.
We don't know why other countries are doing what they're doing.
We don't know if their numbers are accurate, and we don't know if they will flare up later, and we're just on different schedules for flare-ups.
None of that's known. We also could look at what they're doing and say, okay, they did X, Y, and Z, but X, Y, and Z have not been studied, meaning that we don't know exactly what things work and what don't.
We don't know if the culture is different.
We don't know what exactly the factors are.
Could it be the vitamin D, the hydroxychloroquine that they may or may not be using?
Could it be? Who knows?
So if you find yourself doing that, hey, what about Taiwan?
You should not make decisions in public because you just can't compare.
You know, island nations to other nations, etc.
Can't be done. But, as I was saying before, could we find out something if we looked at the whole group of, let's say, all the countries that did well after it's done?
We don't know yet who's going to do well when it's all done.
New Zealand could be the biggest hotspot in the world in a month.
You just don't know. But if we looked at them all, eventually we might be able to tease out of the numbers like, well, it wasn't obvious at the time, but it was this or that that made the big difference.
We don't know that now, so we'd just be guessing.
That is all I've got for now.
Get your weight down.
That is right. Let me give you my best tip for losing weight.
Would you like that? For some of you, this will change your lives.
And I mean that literally.
The next thing I'm going to say, given that there are 3,600 people watching, probably 100,000 people will watch this eventually.
Out of 100,000 people, there are some number of you who are going to hear what I say next and it will just totally change your life.
And it goes like this.
If you're trying to lose weight, don't treat your cravings and your hunger as the same thing.
Meaning that your cravings, usually for sugar, are not really a genuine hunger.
And so what I recommend, if you're trying to lose weight, is that first you work only on your sugar cravings, but you eat as much as you want of things that are good for you.
You can't eat too much broccoli, all right?
So fill yourself up with lean fish and broccoli and nuts and stuff that's good.
And don't ever let yourself be hungry.
Just work on one at a time.
Let's say you've got ten sugary things you like.
It's like, oh, I like ice cream, I like cake, I like candy, whatever.
Whatever it is that your problem is.
And then just the first week or two, just get rid of one of the sweets.
That's it. Eat as much as you want.
You might even be gaining weight.
You're even eating the other sweets.
You just got rid of one.
Then get rid of another one.
Once you've worked yourself down to there's only one sweet left that you've allowed yourself, you're not going to want to eat so much of that that it makes a difference, and by then you'll be close enough to be able to just knock it out.
If you wait about, my experience is, about two months, and that thing that was the most delicious thing in the world will look gross.
And I've done this experiment time and time again with Snickers candy bars.
So my biggest addiction is a Snickers candy bar.
And when I'm having too much sugar, the feeling I get just biting into one, my whole body comes alive.
It's just physically delightful in a way that it's hard to explain.
But that's only if I'm still hooked on sugar.
And no matter how good you are at getting off the sugar, you may have relapses.
I do it all the time. Then I have to work myself off it.
But at the moment, since I've been off more than two months, I can hold a Snickers in my hand and imagine what it would taste like, and it's just gross.
And nothing changed.
Nothing changed, except that I waited two months.
And then the craving went away.
So work on your craving by decreasing your sugar things as well as your simple carbs like white rice and bread and stuff like that.
So just start decreasing them until those are gone.
You may have even gained weight because you ate so much broccoli and salmon and nuts.
And then, if that's your diet, broccoli and salmon and nuts, Adjusting that down a little bit, you know, 10% or whatever, so that your calories are in line.
Exercising a little bit more.
It's a lot easier. So that is my advice.
Divide and conquer.
Never, ever, ever work on a craving at the same time as hunger.
Like actual hunger.
You don't want to deal with two enemies on two fronts at the same time.
Divide and conquer. That little bit of advice...
For the 100,000 of you watching this, probably at least 5,000 of you just said, holy crap, would that work?
Some of you are going to try it.
It works. Now, I can't guarantee that any plan or any diet works for 100% of people.
That would be crazy. But out of 100,000 people...
I probably just changed at least a thousand lives fairly significantly.
So that's why I do this.
That's what it's all about.
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