Episode 1153 Scott Adams: Court Packers, Immunity, Biden Blunders, Missing Coronavirus Data
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Republicans have a health plan framing problem
Biden's court packing ways
CDC mask study: Backwards correlation?
GOP ballot harvesting collection boxes in California
Stats for COVID19 victims receiving the Trump protocol
Algorithm complexity is what gives AI...freewill
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There was a little bit of question whether it was the best part of the day or really just top two, top three.
But I think, I think we have our answer.
Day after day.
Best part of the day. And all you need to...
Hold on, let me put on my microphone.
This would be better. Something tells me you weren't hearing me as well as you should have.
How about now?
Yeah, better. Better, isn't it?
Yeah, you thought this couldn't get better.
And it just did.
Surprise. Yeah, and all you need to do to take this to the next level...
See if you can find yourself a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or sign a canteen jug or flask or vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
And I'm going to ask you to savor it.
Yeah, savor it.
Go. Ooh, yeah.
Savor it. Savor it.
Okay, good. Well, so today, later today, I will be appearing on MSNBC. You're not going to want to miss that.
I don't know what kind of questions they're going to ask me.
I'll be on Aerie Milber's show at...
They give a start time that's usually well in front of the time I'm actually on camera.
But 6pm Eastern Time, 3pm California Time, and they'll be talking to me.
So we'll see how that goes.
You know, I think I told you I started saying no to all interview requests recently.
So I don't think I have anything else on my calendar.
But when this one came in, I thought to myself, well, this one's going to be too much fun.
I'm going to have to take this one.
It has been brought to my attention that there's a very interesting piece of content on HBO called The Vow.
It's a multi-part documentary about a cult of It's called.
It's called a cult.
Called NXIVM or something.
N-X-I-V-M. I don't know how you pronounce it.
NXIVM? But I started watching it, and I think I'm halfway through.
But I can already tell you, you've got to watch this thing.
So I will be talking about it in the context of persuasion.
Because the cult has some interesting techniques, and it is really good documentary because the access they have, where actually things are on film or on audio, it's remarkable.
And if you really want to understand how influenceable or how persuadable people are or what they are willing to believe, you've got to watch this thing.
Because if you think people are gullible or people can be fooled, you haven't seen anything.
And I'll talk about the technique after I give you time to watch it.
So allegedly today there's a big announcement from Apple about their 5G phone.
And most of you are saying to yourself, well, that's nice.
A 5G phone.
It'll be a little bit faster than a 4G phone.
Aren't we glad that each of our phones are a little bit better than the last one?
But I think you'd be missing the big story on this one.
If you didn't notice, stocks were solidly up yesterday, and at least part of the reason is probably Apple.
And part of the reason is when 5G becomes common.
Now, you've got a little bit of a pipeline problem or a capacity problem.
So I don't know if your 5G phone is going to give you 5G speed right away every place you would use it.
But probably, you know, it'll probably start out pretty good.
And here's the thing you need to know about speed.
Speed doesn't just help you do what you are going to do anyway, but make it faster.
This kind of speed will change what you do.
You'll be able to do things that you couldn't do before.
I don't know if that means holograms or 3D or virtual reality worlds.
Probably all of that.
I don't know if it means just completely changing how you commute.
We almost can't see the ways this will change things.
Let me give you my example.
If you have, let's say, a car that can go five miles an hour, You can use it to tool around locally, but you're not going to take it very far.
But if you have a car that can go 100 miles an hour and it can drive for hours and hours, then it's a whole different application.
It's not something you use around town.
It's something you can take a long trip with.
So this 5G stuff is way bigger than you think it is, and it'll take a while for all the reasons that that's true to seep into your consciousness.
This is gigantic.
So I tried watching the Supreme Court nominee hearings for ACB, Amy Coney Barrett, and I thought the whole thing was so worthless I couldn't really watch it.
Is anybody trying to watch that thing?
I feel sorry for the news networks that are covering it, because they kind of have to cover it.
It's big news. But there's literally nothing happening.
Because apparently the Democrats don't want to go too hard at the nominee because it might backfire.
But on the other hand, they have to act like they're putting up a fight or they have to use their time to complain about the president or Obamacare.
So it turned into nothing but theater.
We took this important government process It just turned it into, you know, kabuki theater or something.
It doesn't have any functional purpose at all.
And yet we're going to still do it.
That's the weird thing about people.
I suppose, as the Dilbert cartoonist, I'm glad it happens.
But people will do things they know don't make sense just because of inertia or the way things are.
So that's what we're seeing.
I would say that's worth about zero minutes of your time to watch those hearings, because you know where that's going to go.
Are you disappointed with the Republican and Trump plans on health care?
I feel as if Trump has a far better, at least, opportunity to sell his health care preferred You know, method.
If he would package it up better.
But the way it's being framed right now is that there's this thing called the ACA or Obamacare and that Trump wants to kill it.
And that's the frame.
He wants to kill it and he doesn't have anything that has a name on it that's sort of packaged as its replacement.
So if you're a senior citizen or you're just somebody who thinks you're at risk of losing your health care, What are you going to think about this situation?
You're going to say to yourself, uh, I kind of know what Obamacare is because I think I have it.
And the Republicans are offering frickin' nothing.
Now, that's not true.
They are actually offering a bunch of stuff, but they haven't packaged it in any way.
So when you think about it, you don't think of it as anything.
You say, well, I'm glad that maybe there's something about drug prices going down and I'm happy that maybe the mandate won't be there, and I might be happy about telehealth being allowed over state boundaries, etc. So if you thought about it, there'd be a whole bunch of individual things that you liked, but they don't feel like a replacement for Obamacare.
It just feels like you're losing something.
And as I told you before, That the threat of losing something always feels more oppressive than the opportunity to get something.
So the way human psychology works is that we're way more concerned about losing something we already have than we are excited about getting a new thing.
And that's very important to know about people.
So right now what the Trump administration is offering is less.
How would you like to have less stuff?
Now, they're not.
That is not an accurate description of what they're offering, but it feels like it.
And they've sort of allowed that frame to take form, that there is this health care thing.
Yeah, it's not perfect, but even that's going to go away.
That doesn't describe what would happen, but that's the frame that has taken form, and I think the Republicans have to answer for that.
I would go so far as to say that if Trump loses, and let's say the Republicans lose the Senate as well, and if it turns out that the reason that that happened was people were concerned about healthcare and they didn't think the Republicans had enough of a plan, I would say they earned the loss.
I would say the Republicans deserve to lose under those conditions.
Now, I don't want that to happen.
I would hope that they would do a little better job in the next few weeks of saying what they would do versus the ACA. But at the moment, they have framed it in a way they deserve to lose, honestly, because health care is kind of what's left.
Now, if they did lose because of that, the irony would be That Trump would have succeeded so well that he succeeded himself out of a job, meaning that the only thing left to talk about was the thing he didn't make enough of an impact on.
Because we wouldn't be talking about ISIS, because he took care of it.
We're not going to be talking about the NAFTA, because he renegotiated it.
We're not going to be talking about North Korea, Because they seem to be sort of not a problem at the moment.
We're not going to be talking about renegotiating with China because that will be already underway.
We're not going to be talking so much about even the border because the border looks like it became somewhat less of a problem because immigration slowed down, I believe, because of coronavirus.
So the president, by doing a good job, has reduced the number of topics we care about And even the economy is recovering well.
People would say, well, I think it's on the right path.
It'd probably do okay under a different administration.
So he really has narrowed the targets down to the one thing that he's not strong on, which is health care.
He kind of needs to fix that pretty quickly, I would think.
And as I say, there's plenty to talk about.
And here's what I think the Republicans have done wrong from the start.
And I've said this.
The Democrats have a better goal, but the Republicans have a better system.
Now, I favor systems over goals, so therefore I favor the Republican approach.
But they haven't framed it right.
They haven't packaged it right.
And here's how I would package it.
I would accept the Democrats' goal.
And I would say, yeah, even as a Republican, it is our absolute goal that everybody will have health care.
Affordable health care.
We'll just get there in a different way.
And what we would hope is that we would take it from whatever it is now.
I don't know. 12%, 8%.
How many people don't have health care at the moment?
And I would say, okay...
It's at this number, whatever it is, around 10%.
By the end of my fourth year, I would like to get that down to 2%.
If you heard something like that, you might say to yourself, okay, they've got a system, they've got a goal that I agree with, and Bernie's got, you know, if you look at sort of the Bernie-type plans that Biden might do or Kamala Harris might do, it looks more like it's harder to get there.
It's like they don't have a plan to get there that makes sense math-wise.
So I think that's where the Republicans could go.
I've suggested on Twitter that Trump should run an ad saying that he's the only candidate for president who's immune to the coronavirus.
Now, of course there is a debate as to whether Trump has any immunity.
Or if he has immunity, is it short term?
Some say four months, some say longer.
And I don't know that it matters, because it would be so hilarious if he started tweeting that he's the only candidate who's immune to the coronavirus, that the press would go nuts, because they'd be, no, no, that is not scientifically valid.
And the...
Wish you could shop for doctors by procedure.
Yeah, that's a good comment.
Anyway, so it would be funny if he did that.
I don't think he will. A troll came after me today on Twitter.
And said he can't wait to see how unhappy I am, and what will I do if Trump were to lose the election?
And I replied back to the effect, I don't think you know me very well.
I would get over that in about 10 minutes.
I don't have a long recovery time from bad news.
Some bad news you have to work on.
It causes you work to get out of the hole you ended up in.
But I don't spend a lot of time fretting about the past.
And the past happens immediately.
If it turned out, and I'm still predicting that Trump will win, but if it turned out that he didn't, I'm pretty sure I would get over that in about ten minutes.
That's just me. You might have a different experience.
Biden apparently has revealed a little bit about his court packing ways.
And by the way, is it just me?
Or does court packing sound vaguely like an insult?
You frickin' court packer.
Doesn't it just have the right...
Consonants and sounds to sound like an insult.
You freaking court-packer.
You damn court-packer, you.
Well, it sounds like an insult.
And here's what Biden said to give us another hint what he's thinking about.
He said, quote, I'm not a fan of court-packing, but I don't want to get off on that whole issue, Biden told CNN affiliate.
I want to keep focused.
The president would love nothing better than to fight about whether or not I would, in fact, pack the court or not pack the court.
Is he the dumbest guy you've ever met in your life?
I think he might have been smart at one point in his life.
No fair with the comments I'm saying there.
Let's not make it gay jokes, okay?
The court-packer by itself sounds like an insult.
You don't have to bring it into another domain.
So here he is saying he's not a fan of court-packing.
He's very cleverly, or stupidly, I haven't decided which, it might actually be brilliant, because we might have reached a point where people are so irrational about everything That Biden can actually just say something that he knows will be taken two different ways by two different groups.
So he can say something that will make Republicans sound comfortable because he says, I'm not a fan of court packing.
So if you're a Republican, you hear that say, not a fan of court packing.
Okay, okay.
He's obviously not a guy who's going to do court packing.
So I guess I feel comfortable about that.
So the Republicans have something they can, you know, hold on to.
Meanwhile, the progressives who would like some court packing, they listen to the second part of it.
He goes, you know, I just don't want to get off on that whole issue.
So I don't want him to fight about whether I would or would not pack the court.
So he's still leaving it open.
Leaving it open.
But here's the real question.
Why are you asking Joe Biden about court packing?
The only one that matters, yeah, I'm seeing in the comments, you're way ahead of me, does Kamala Harris like court packing?
Because something like greater than half of voters, including the people who would vote for Biden, even most of them believe he won't make it four years.
So, you're not really talking about Biden's opinion, you're talking about Biden's opinion for a while, plus Kamala's opinion for whatever time is remaining, or even the second term if she were the one to run for the term after that.
So, shouldn't we be really pushing on that?
You know, I think we've heard everything we need to from Joe Biden.
But we kind of need to hear from the VP nominee.
And if we don't hear from that, you have to assume that she's in favor of it, or at least that there's some chance she's in favor of it, which should change people's minds.
All right, there's a CDC study.
This will be a good indication of how useless data is.
The CDC study shows that 85% of COVID cases were people who often or always wear masks.
So what's that tell you?
Number one is from the CDC, so you can trust that, right?
Well, not anymore, unfortunately.
We've had a bad experience with experts recently.
So there's no such thing as a credible source of data anymore.
There are still organizations that are sort of credible, but not when they give you data.
It doesn't matter who it is.
Anybody giving you data in 2020 is probably lying to you or incorrect.
And when I say probably, I mean 9 out of 10 times.
So, would you conclude that if 85% of people who get COVID Wore their masks.
What's the obvious implication?
Draw a conclusion.
85% of them wore masks and got it anyway.
Therefore, go.
Therefore, masks don't work, right?
It's good evidence.
It comes from the CDC. So that's reliable, right?
And 85% of the people with masks got it anyway, so I guess those masks don't work.
Is that what you have concluded?
Well, if you're bad at analyzing data, you've concluded that.
If you're good at analyzing data, you might say something like Julia Pollock tweeted, who is an economist, what if I told you about economists?
Economists are trained at understanding whether the right things have been compared and knowing whether a rational comparison has been made.
And she points out the following two problems.
Number one, it's people who claim to have worn masks.
People lie. People lie about how often they wear masks, especially if they're being asked by somebody you know would judge you.
If a stranger calls you and says, do you wear your mask often?
Even people who don't wear masks often or don't think they wear them often are going to be tempted to say, Yeah, I totally wear my mask pretty much all the time, even if they don't.
That's one problem. I think that's the smaller one.
And then the other problem is that they're not accounting for the differences in risk and exposure.
Exactly. Who wears a mask in the first place?
Somebody who needs to.
Do people get coronavirus if there are people who are not around any virus?
The people who don't wear masks are far more likely to be the people who rightly judge that they're not at much risk because they're maybe not spending time around crowds.
Maybe they live in a town that has almost or no coronavirus risk.
Maybe they're young, so they're not bothering.
But correlation on this is probably backwards.
It's probably backwards.
Now, you can't tell, but you have to allow this great possibility that the reason people wear masks in certain situations and they're less likely to wear masks than others is because they know where the virus is, at least statistically.
And so they wear the masks if they're in a place where there's a lot of virus.
Now, where are you likely to get a virus?
Probably in a place with a lot of viruses.
I used to joke where I lived a few homes ago.
Whenever I looked outside and I saw somebody going for a run, they would almost always be overweight.
And I would say to myself, that's weird.
Does running make you fat?
Because all the people I see running look like they're trying to lose weight.
So running must make you fat.
And of course that's a joke.
The correlation is backwards.
The people who thought they needed to lose a few pounds went running.
So I think that might be what's happening with this mask thing.
It's useless data in any case.
California has an interesting situation.
Apparently some GOP entity has put up ballot collection boxes of their own.
You didn't see that coming, did you?
So there are these official-looking ballot collection boxes that are not trying to look like government entities.
So they're not pretending they're the post office.
It's obviously a private GOP thing.
And you can just throw your ballot in there.
Do you trust that? Would you trust a private ballot collection box that's not a government mailbox?
If you trust that, you're really gullible.
Now, I'm not going to say that the people who put them up there have bad intentions.
Don't know. I'm just saying that I wouldn't put my ballot In a private ballot collection box.
And if you're dumb enough to do that, you shouldn't be voting.
You're not smart enough to vote if you put your ballot in Bob's collection box.
You're saying to yourself, well, it looks like they spelled all the words right on the collection box.
Looks good enough to me.
What could go wrong?
And so the government of California has declared that these things are illegal.
But here's the funny part.
How could it be illegal to have a box with some words on it?
It couldn't possibly be illegal.
Because it's not pretending to be anything other than what it is.
It would certainly be illegal if it were pretending to be the US Postal Service, right?
That would be illegal. It would be illegal if they were claiming to be something they weren't.
But it's claiming to be exactly what it is.
A convenient way to have your ballot get picked up.
Now, I certainly wouldn't trust it, but how is it illegal?
Let me ask you this.
If I took a box, just a box I could carry, and I knocked on your door, and I said, hey, I'm picking up some ballots, and I can save you a trip to the mailbox.
If you like, you can throw your ballot in my box that's in my hand, and I'll carry it over to the mailbox for you.
I'll carry it to the post office.
Would that be illegal?
Well, it depends on your state, right?
If you live in a state where ballot harvesting is illegal...
Yes. Doesn't matter if you have a separate box.
Doesn't matter if you knock on the door.
If your state says you can't bring somebody else's ballots in, it's illegal.
But in California, apparently, that's not illegal.
It's not illegal to knock on the door and say, can I take your ballot?
So the state of California is trying to claim that these little boxes that do the same thing as knocking on the door is just a little bit more efficient.
Why knock on the door if you're not ready?
Wait till you're ready.
You just put it in the box.
And the thing that's hilarious about this is that I'm pretty sure Democrats thought they had the advantage with this ballot harvesting stuff.
And then the Republicans do what Republicans do.
What is it the Republicans do that's better than what Democrats do consistently?
They come up with better systems.
If you're going to build something or manage something, call a Republican.
Republicans are pretty good on systems.
They're pretty good at setting up a mechanism, figuring out how to make something work.
That's what they do, right?
That's what they do.
Democrats, their system looks a little bit like CHOP or CHAZ, right?
Looks a little bit more chaotic.
So you don't want to trust the Democrats to set up a system.
So they set up this thing, and the very first thing that happens is the Republicans in California come up with a superior system.
And they get these boxes distributed all over, and now the government's going to have to fight with what it means to be harvesting ballots.
And as far as I know, They're going to have a hard time declaring these things illegal.
Because I don't think there's any law that says you can't have an accurately labeled box sitting on your lawn.
If it's accurately labeled.
It's accurate.
So anyway, that's hilarious.
On a completely different topic, I follow a Twitter account by...
Somebody named Brian Romele, R-O-E-M-M-E-L-E, if you want to look for it.
Definitely worth following.
He has lots of new technologies and, you know, what's coming next kind of tweets.
And one of them just will blow your head off.
Apparently now, our hologram technology is so good that there's this device from, let's see, called...
A port-el hologram.
So you can follow them at port-el hologram, all one word, port-el hologram.
And you can see that they have this thing that's phone booth-sized, in which inside the little phone booth-sized hologram generator, there is a full-sized human being who looks exactly like somebody you're standing in front of.
And they're walking and talking, and They could be a deep fake or it could be a projection of somebody who's standing somewhere else and they're just being projected as a hologram.
And it looks pretty amazing.
Looks pretty amazing.
Somebody says you just looked and it looks terrible.
You must be looking at something different than what I'm looking at.
But it will be difficult to explain how powerful this is.
And let me tell you a little story.
From my experience, to give you a sense.
Yeah, my cat Boo's doing a walk-by.
I told you this a while ago.
Microsoft has a version of their, what do you call it, enhanced reality, where it places objects in the room with you, but you can't see them unless you're wearing the special goggles.
Now, if you're wearing the special goggles, you have a cool experience.
And here's the experience I had When I tried them out in my home, I saw a demo version before they were available.
I put on the goggles in my own home.
This is the key part.
My own home.
I put them on and I turned on a...
I think it was a mystery game.
So it was like a murder mystery game where there would be characters that would interact in your space and there would be this murder mystery.
And you'd have to figure it out, I guess.
And I put the glasses on, and I see it map the room.
It puts a layer of, like, wireframe.
You can see the wireframe going over your furniture and stuff in your room.
And you think, whoa, that's cool.
It just mapped my whole room.
But here's the freaky part.
It didn't just map the space in your room.
It knew what the things were.
It knew what a chair was.
My cat's going to do another walkthrough if you see a tail go by.
And then it introduced characters into my living room, and they walked into my living room from a doorway from another room that it just happened to know was a doorway because it mapped it.
Those full-sized characters walked in front of me and sat down on my couch.
The couch was L-shaped.
Some of them sat on one L, and some of them sat on the other part of the L, and they set something on my coffee table, and it blew my frickin' brain out.
Now, these particular enhanced reality creatures did not look like realistic people.
In other words, you could see through them a little bit, so you could tell that they were sort of shadow people.
But there were good representations of people.
Now, when you take that over to the hologram world, imagine now the glasses are off.
Imagine doing this same experiment, but no glasses.
It's your own room, and maybe you've replaced the light bulbs with this technology.
I doubt that's possible.
But imagine it wouldn't be too hard to just put some sensors and lights in any room So your room could produce a photorealistic hologram that could interact with your room.
It could walk around.
It could walk around.
Until you see this, you don't know what's coming.
Trust me, there's some stuff coming that is bigger than anything you could ever imagine.
And if you're worried about everything that's been invented, already been invented, nope.
Nope, there's stuff coming that hasn't been invented.
I mean, it has been, but it hasn't been commercialized.
So you've got some fun stuff coming, some really fun stuff, and I'm sure you're already thinking about the applications.
All right, and I've said in a related matter, I've said this before, but it's worth reiterating, that no matter who wins in 2020, the presidency, I believe Trump will be our last human president.
Last human president.
What I mean is that AI will effectively be making our decisions.
There will still be a person who gets elected, but they won't have the flexibility that past presidents had to use their judgment and their instinct and their hunches and whatever, and make decisions that are real leadership decisions.
Rather, in the future, the algorithms will decide what things we see, And then we'll decide that those are the most important things.
And if those are the most important things, and we could tell who favors which part of the policy for those most important things, the leaders are just going to have to follow it.
Now, you say to me, Scott, Scott, Scott, the algorithms are not AI. The algorithms are just some math, and they're made by people.
It's the people that decide what the algorithm does, and then the algorithm does things, but it's all people.
The algorithm is just a little tool.
It's no different than scissors and a computer.
It's not important. It's just the tool.
Is that what's happening?
I think that's where we differ.
Let me give you an example.
This week, I was complaining that YouTube had demonetized one of my videos earlier in the week, and there was no reason given.
So I complained about it on Twitter, and to YouTube's credit, they noticed I was complaining on Twitter, and they contacted me on Twitter and said, which video was it?
We'll do a manual review.
And they said, you know, it's not obvious what's wrong with it.
They couldn't just look at it and, oh, it's obvious what you did wrong.
They said, we're going to have to manually review it.
So I give them the link, they manually reviewed, and then this morning they got back to me and they said, the video is fine.
It's been re-monetized.
So problem solved, right?
Here's the weird part.
The humans are not aware, still, what was wrong with it.
In other words, the algorithm flagged it, demonetized it, and never revealed its secret for why.
Now, when the humans looked at it, they had the ability to reverse it.
But do you think that your video would have been reversed?
If you were not the Dilbert guy, if you didn't have half a million people following you On Twitter, and you hadn't complained in public, and you weren't leaving kind of a big footprint, would yours have been corrected?
I'd like to think that YouTube is so on it that it wouldn't matter who complained.
If they saw a complaint, they would deal with it.
I'd like to think that's true, but I'll bet they wouldn't have seen it.
I don't think you could have reached them.
I just had this little semi-famous person advantage that probably helped.
And if there were no humans who know why I was demonetized, if this were to happen to you, who would have made the decision to demonetize you?
No human being involved.
No human being would be involved in the initial decision to demonetize you And no human being would ever explain it to you or fix it later.
You would be too small.
Now, what would happen if the algorithm simply decided, you know, using its math, it decided to focus on some videos that had certain messages and not on others?
Would the people who made the algorithms be aware of it?
Would they know exactly that this video was emphasized over this one?
Apparently not. Because they couldn't tell why mine was demonetized.
There's a little bit too much complexity.
Maybe the people who look at monetization are not the ones who programmed it.
They wouldn't know what they're looking at anyway.
And if they asked, it would be too complicated a conversation.
So they wouldn't really know.
If you ask the programmer, the programmers would probably say, first of all, it's not like there's one programmer.
Yeah, it would be a A team of programmers who probably only know their little hunk, their little piece of the algorithm, just guessing.
That seems like a reasonable guess.
I don't think anybody would be able to answer the question.
So the complexity is what gives AI free will.
I'll just let that hang there for a little while.
The complexity Is what gives AI, in this case the algorithms that decide what you see on social media, is what gives it free will.
What do I mean by that?
Free will in human beings is based on the fact that you can't predict what I'll do.
That's it. Because I'm complicated.
My brain is complex.
So you can't tell, based on what I'm doing now, It's too complicated.
You can't get all the variables.
You can't determine all my inputs.
You don't know what my cause and effect is.
You don't know my body chemistry.
You don't know my history. But if you knew that, and if you had the galaxy-sized brain to look at all those inputs and figure out how my brain is wired, you could know what I'll do.
The only thing that gives me the impression of free will is that even I don't know what I'm doing sometimes.
And you certainly don't know what I'm going to choose.
So it is only my complexity, the fact that you don't know what I'm going to do, that gives you the impression I have free will.
This morning, when YouTube told me that they didn't know, basically, they didn't have to say this directly, it's obvious in context, they don't know why the algorithm did what it did.
It's too complex.
Today was the day The AI was confirmed.
It already had it, but today was the day that it was confirmed to me that AI already has free will.
Exactly like mine.
It does what it does by formula, and it will do that if it gave it the same inputs.
It would do the same thing every time if it was exactly the same inputs.
But it's too complicated.
We can't predict it.
It's on its own now.
It has free will.
I'll just leave you with that thought.
All right, moving along.
Here's an interesting factoid.
Disney World in Florida is open with, obviously, masks and whatnot, whereas Disneyland in California remains closed.
Differences between how the states are managing this.
This is one of the best things that's happened in the coronavirus because this is going to be the closest we will get To knowing which of the two methods worked.
So if the Disney World that opened ends up with a good result, meaning very few people get the virus because of it, to the extent that they can determine that, that's going to tell us something.
And if they cause massive infections because they opened in Disney World in Florida, well then California was the smart one.
I think we're going to find out something pretty useful, because it's sort of unusual that you would have such an apples-to-apples comparison between states.
So, good to know.
If you said to yourself, I think they should both open up, you could make that argument, and I think Disney is making that argument.
They think they should open up.
But you should also be a little bit happy that you got a good comparison thing here.
We're going to know something about Disney World That's going to be really, really useful, I think.
And I'm guessing that we'll be able to track that somehow.
Don't you know that data is important?
Has anybody told you that we should make decisions based on data?
Has anybody mentioned that lately in this election cycle?
It's all you hear. We must use the data.
We must listen to the experts.
Follow the data.
Follow the data. That's what all the dumb people say.
Following the data would be a terrific idea if you had data.
Following the data would be a terrific idea if you had the data and it was reliable and it was right under those conditions and you knew what to do with it.
You know, you knew how to act based on that data.
But that's a lot of ifs, isn't it?
Here's a good example.
What is the only data about the coronavirus that you would need to know?
To really understand where we are and where we're going, what is the one bit of data you would need?
You might say to yourself, a death rate.
Nope. Nope.
That's what I would have said a few weeks ago.
I would have said, as long as you know the death rate, That's pretty much what you need to know in terms of where we're heading.
Somebody else, somebody smarter, would say, you need to know the hospitalization rate.
Because first of all, the hospitalization rate can, to some degree, will predict the death rate.
But also, you need to know your hospital capacity.
You don't want to go over it.
And you also get your people who have long-term problems, and they would be picked up in the hospitalization, wouldn't be picked up in the death rate.
So that's all you need, right?
Somebody says recovery rate.
Nope. You don't need the recovery rate.
You don't need the hospitalization rate.
You don't need the death rate.
It would be good to have, and they have value.
So I'm not saying you shouldn't know them.
I'm saying that the most important data, which we could get, it's achievable, we could collect it, we haven't.
And it goes like this.
How many people are dying who are getting the right meds and the right treatment?
Right? Because that's all that matters.
If we're throwing people in who are having problems today with the average of how they were doing before we had good therapeutics, back in the day when we would stick people on ventilators and the ventilator itself would kill them, I think a lot of the deaths were from ventilator misuse.
Nobody's fault, because nobody knew what to do in the early days.
Certainly, definitely not any kind of medical malpractice or anything.
I'm not suggesting that. But we didn't know.
So can you tell me that you know, or that anybody has collected, the only data that matters?
You went into the hospital, and you got your remdesivir, let's say you were at that stage, or you got your Regeneron, or you got your vitamin D, you got your zinc, and maybe your baby aspirin, whatever else, maybe some azithromycin, and That's the only data I want to know.
Now on top of that, I also need to know availability of those meds.
So if the Regeneron needs, let's say, two weeks or three months or whatever it is to ramp up so everybody can have it in this country, I need to know that.
Because that's telling me when we can get to a better place.
Same with the remdesivir.
So I would want to know how many people are dying With the right treatment, let's call it the Trump protocol, okay?
Just to keep it simple. The same stuff Trump got, you have to assume is the good stuff, right?
So, plus remdesivir, I don't think he got that, but he didn't need it.
So, if we don't know that, do you know anything?
Seriously, do you know anything?
If you don't know that.
It's the only number I think matters to how well we're doing, when we're going to get out of this, how bad is it, do we open up, do we not open up.
All of our decisions are based on this one thing.
How do we do today, like today, October 13th, how would you do today if you went into the hospital and you got the full Trump protocol?
Right? Because it's nowhere near the death rate Of March.
And I feel like we're making decisions based on March through October death rates, which would be insane.
And somebody says the deaths are grossly inflated.
But I would say that anybody who got the Trump protocol would be certainly confirmed to be somebody who's got a coronavirus problem.
I'm pretty sure by the time you get the full protocol, they know that the coronavirus is the thing that's going to kill you or not.
So there is definitely a question about how the deaths are counted.
But I think we could count the...
If you looked at the excess mortality, you'd be okay.
So if you knew excess mortality had gone down to normal...
Because people who got the treatments, their death rate had gone down to a trivial number.
That would be a lot to know.
All right. So you can love having data, but if you collect the wrong data, it doesn't matter.
As I mentioned earlier, if you're the CDC and you collect the data that 85% of the people getting the virus are wearing a mask, how did that help you?
In fact, it probably hurt you because people would misinterpret the data.
Now, they might misinterpret it in a way that actually helps you if it made them wear them.
No, in that case, I think they would wear the mask less.
So people would misinterpret it and do the wrong thing.
Data is very overrated.
Data is usually wrong.
That's just a fact.
All data... Is usually wrong.
And wrong enough that it would change how you deal with it.
Somebody says, I'm laughing at your blind loyalty to your cult leader.
You must be new here.
Whoever's laughing at my blind loyalty to my cult leader, You must be brand new, and you must have joined later in this very periscope.
Because the entire first part of the periscope was criticizing Trump for healthcare not being packaged into a good plan.
Did you miss that part?
Did you miss the part where I said it would take me 10 minutes to get over him losing if he lost?
What is it about all of you Democrats who can't see anything clearly?
If you can see one thing clearly, it's that I'm not a slave to dogma.
If you don't get that, you've missed the most essential part of me, that I could change my mind in a heartbeat on anything.
It's one of my advantages.
In fact, it's the only reason anybody's watching me.
If all I did was get on here and do a blind obedience, everything Trump does is terrific, If that's all I did, I don't think people would be too interested in coming back because I would just be another celebrity with a stupid opinion.
It's only because I do have the facility to go in either direction that makes me worth watching.
For my critic who I'm talking to right now, you might also not know that I consider myself left of Bernie, at least on the social stuff.
Now, I don't think that Bernie is good at math, so he doesn't know how to pay for the things he wants, and that's the problem.
I'm not going to be impractical.
I like his goals, have everybody have a good education, and want everybody to be free, etc.
But he needs to be able to figure out how to do it.
It's got to be practical. All right.
That is all for today.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
It's so awkward when I try to hit that little X to end this and I can't hit it with my thumb.
I All right. Periscope is turned off.
We're on YouTube only now, live streaming.
Thoughts on Kanye and Joe Rogan and his presidential ad?
I didn't see that. Does Kanye have an ad?
There's an actual Kanye ad.
Data are facts.
Statistics are interpretation.
Not true. Data are alleged facts.
If data were facts, we'd probably be in a lot better shape.
But usually data is out of context and it's just wrong.
Is locals still a thing?
Oh yeah, let me give you an update on locals.
So locals.com is a platform, full disclosure, I have a small investment in it as well.
And that's where I do everything that I don't do in public, I do there.
So there's a whole bunch of other content, including micro lessons on success and being more effective, as well as some content that's a little too edgy to be on Twitter or to be on YouTube.
So Locals is not only working, but it's working embarrassingly well.
The number of people who were willing to pay a subscription to see extra content actually is humbling.
Because way more demand than I could have imagined.
And so far they seem happy.
The retention is excellent.
People are adding every week.
So yeah, locals.com.
You go there and you can follow people like me, people like Greg Gutfeld.
I think Don Jr.
is there. A bunch of other people are going over.
And what you'll see there is stuff you can't see in other places.
Somebody says, you need a coupon code.
No, you don't need a coupon code.
The creators can create a coupon to give you a discount, but you don't need that.
You can just go there and sign up.
And it's working great, by the way.
And the community over there is just people who want to be part of my community.
So I have basically no trolls.
Imagine a social media platform...
That because it's subscription, it basically eliminates all of the trolls.
Every bit of content, and other people post things as well.
So I look at other people's content, and it's exactly what I want to see.
And it's because somebody who followed me kind of knows what I would like to see and knows what other people who follow me would like to see.
And so it's this whole environment where I only see stuff that's interesting and I wanted to see it.
It's the weirdest thing.
And there are no trolls. And people pay a subscription fee to be there.
Somebody says, what is the $7 subscription fee for?
It is for content that you won't see anywhere else.
But on top of that, and I didn't see this coming exactly, there's a little bit of a Patreon element to it.
Patreon allows you just to essentially donate to creators that you would like to incentivize to do more.
And so I think a lot of people just join locals because they're supporting my voice, and then they also give some extra content.
But if you like Robots Read News, my edgier comic that I only do on the web, some of those I will tweet.
I'll put it onto Twitter so it acts as an advertisement for locals.
But most of the really naughty ones I just keep on locals.
If it's too edgy, I just keep it there.
Alright, that's all for now, and I will talk to you.
Just to give you one more example of what is on locals, yesterday I did a detailed tour of my office, down to the real details, which some people would find interesting, but others would not.
