Episode 1473 Scott Adams: All the Headlines With Twice the Sipping. Get in Here. Whiteboard Coming.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Is the cat on the roof...in Delaware?
Withdrawal decisions psychology
Democrats don't understand human motivation
Whiteboard: Afghanistan Withdrawal
Larry David, Alan Dershowitz grocery store dust-up
Alabama ICU capacity
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Yeah, that's the sound of crisp paper coming out of my new HP printer that was just installed.
Working like a champ!
And I think that that is a sign of a great show to come.
Great show. And, if that's not enough, I'm just getting started.
That's right, the whiteboard behind me.
Don't get too excited.
I know what that does to you.
But wow, it's going to be a good one.
And if you'd like to take it up a notch, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind, filled with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go. So good.
Well, so it turns out that Alabama is getting crushed in their ICU capacity.
So their overcapacity, half of the people in there are there for COVID, so that's what's crushing stuff.
But they say only 12% of the patients in the hospital are fully vaccinated, which means...
It's not really a problem of vaccinated people.
It's a problem of unvaccinated people.
And I was thinking, have you noticed how getting a vaccination is a lot like voting?
Alabama basically voted to not get vaccinated because I think it's the lowest vaccinated state or one of them.
So the people in Alabama looked at the news, same as you did, did their own research, maybe not the same as you did, And came to the conclusion, in a sense, they voted to be an unvaccinated state.
Relatively unvaccinated.
And they got what they wanted, which was no ICU capacity.
I don't know what to do about people getting what they want.
Right? Because on one level, you want everybody to do well and have good outcomes, but what if they choose bad outcomes?
Right? What if they get exactly what they chose?
I don't know. I feel as if the people in Alabama had the same information everybody else did.
Now, could they be right?
Well, in the end, what if people who got vaccinated grow horns?
Well, if that happens, those people in Alabama are going to look pretty, pretty smart, aren't they?
Because you'll be walking around with your vaccination horns.
And you'll be like, gosh, I wish I hadn't gotten vaccinated because I grew horns.
And then you go to Alabama and everybody's like, no horns?
And you're like, these guys are freaking geniuses.
They saw this coming.
They made the right choice.
Anyway, the point is, we don't know who will be right, but we can say for sure that Alabama got what they voted for, in a sense.
Jack Posobiec had a couple of good tweets today, as he often does.
He's got a little scoop, I guess, an inside story, saying that Biden is telling staff that he wants to go back to Delaware.
He hasn't been sleeping well this week.
Hmm. Did anything happen this week that would make a sitting president lose sleep?
Anything, anything.
Ah. The weather?
No, no.
Was there anything in the headlines that would make a president feel anxious or lose sleep?
I can't think of anything.
Anybody? Anybody? You got anything?
I got nothing. So, clearly, Biden is correct that the problem is probably the bed.
The problem is the bed.
He's got a bad bed in the White House, but that Delaware bed is just firm enough...
He doesn't say if he uses a MyPillow topper in Delaware, but I'll bet.
I'll bet he's got a MyPillow topper, because that's the good bed.
And so he wants to stay in Delaware.
But here's another way to interpret that, because there are always multiple ways to interpret.
The other way to interpret it is that the cat is on the roof.
You know the joke? It's an old joke.
Cat is on the roof. The short version is that It's warning you that something might happen to the cat later, but we don't want to break it to you right away.
Well, let's just say the cat's on the roof.
Later we might tell you the cat fell off the roof.
Maybe he has an injury. And then later we'll say the cat passed away, but by then you're all primed.
You know, you're kind of ready for it.
I feel like they're readying the public.
Step one, make a really bad decision.
Step two, stay in Delaware because you can't sleep.
Step three, say that you've got a little bit of a headache.
Step four, you're feeling tired.
Step five, well, pretty soon, President Kamala Harris.
So that's what it's looking like.
The only slight flaw with the plan, just a little flaw with the plan, it's a great plan, except for the part that Kamala Harris is even less trusted than Biden.
Now, let me tell you how brilliant this plan would have been if the vice president had any capabilities whatsoever.
Really good. It would have been a good plan.
Because Biden would have beaten Trump for the presidency, then a capable person would have slid right into that job, and that would have been pretty, pretty good.
But for that plan to work, you don't want your vice president to be less competent than somebody whose brain stopped working about nine years ago.
But that's what they did. So there's your good planning.
Rasmussen says, asks people how likely do people think it is, likely voters, how likely do you think it is that Harris would replace Biden before his term is over?
51% said it was highly likely or somewhat likely.
So over half of the country thinks it's at least somewhat likely that That the person who got elected president won't make it four years.
Now, how much less trust could you have in your government than think they won't even survive?
Basically, people are putting similar odds on Biden making it through as the Afghan government surviving the Taliban.
Yeah, they're not that different.
One was like a six-month.
Remember, the intelligence agency said that the Afghan government would last maybe six months, which is very similar to what people believe Biden will last.
So there was a point where we weren't sure if the Afghan government or the American government would last longer.
I'm not making that up.
There was a real point this year where the intelligence people weren't quite sure if the Afghan government would fall before the American government, meaning that Biden would leave office.
Surprise, surprise.
All right, but 26% say it's not likely that Biden will leave office, or they don't know.
26%. What is that close to?
It's very close to 25%.
That's what it's close to.
And as you know, 25% of people will get the wrong answer on any survey.
Doesn't matter what the topic is.
25% of the public are going to get the wrong answer.
Or act like they don't know.
So let's dig into this Afghan withdrawal story.
I'll tell you why this is interesting to me.
Because there's just a ton of psychology...
Involved in analyzing the whole thing.
And that's the interesting part to me.
The number one psychology layer here is Dunning-Kruger.
Dunning-Kruger is when people think that they're more capable than they are.
How many of you are pretty sure you could have done military logistical training better than the experts?
Pretty much all of us.
I think all of us, really.
Now, are we right?
Can we really do military planning better than the experts?
We actually think we can.
In this specific case, people are like, in this case, I think I could have.
But could we? Let's dig into it a little bit and find out if you're all Dunning-Kruger'd up or if you're actually one of the smart people who could have gotten this right.
So the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, he said that he was explaining things.
He said that the intelligence indicated there were multiple possible scenarios after the troop withdrawal.
And that he saw nothing warning of a total collapse within 11 days of U.S. departure.
All right? Let's say that's true.
Now, don't assume anything anybody tells you is true, because everybody's covering their ass at this point.
But look, let's just play it through.
Let's say it was true, because I think they're saying this consistently, that nobody believed that the army would fall in 11 days.
Now, what is it I always tell you about Democrats that they get wrong?
In the comments, tell me, what do I always remind you that Democrats get wrong every time?
That's right, human motivation.
Human motivation is their blind spot.
Every time Democrats get something wrong, it's the same thing.
It's the same damn thing.
Every time. What did they get wrong this time?
Human motivation. What does an Afghan government who believes that their survival depends on American military presence, what do they do when you withdraw?
They run.
Human motivation.
Are you surprised?
Now, the only thing that should have mattered is we should have talked to the people in the Afghan government and said, hypothetically, if you saw the U.S. military presence drawing down and it was trying to get to zero pretty quickly, whether it's months or days, but pretty quickly, what do you think you'd do?
How do you think you'd act if the American military left?
What would they say? Well, they'd probably lie, right?
But I feel like you could have deduced...
That the Afghan government didn't think it could survive.
And if the Afghan government didn't think it could survive, whether we left quickly or slowly, what the hell are they going to do if they find out we're leaving?
They're going to run. Or they're going to join the Taliban, or they're going to do whatever it is that looks like they could survive.
So... And then the second question I ask is, why are there so many people there?
I'm no genius about Afghanistan, but didn't we know months ago?
We knew months ago that you needed to get out of there if you were an American or if you had any risk once the Taliban took over.
Didn't you know that months ago to get the hell out of there?
Weren't they all warned months ago?
How much responsibility do you have for people who have been warned to help themselves and then chose not to?
Like, where does your responsibility end when people do the wrong thing right in front of you?
I don't know. How many troops do we want to risk saving people who wouldn't save themselves?
It's a sort of a philosophical, ethical question.
So... Let's take a look at the whiteboard.
Are you ready? Let's go to the whiteboard.
So here's my interest in this.
I'm a little bit interested in knowing if anybody made a mistake, right, in the decision-making.
But I'm way interested in how decisions are made and, you know, just the process of decision-making.
So I'm going to draw it out the way I see it.
I see that there were two options, but in your mind you can, of course, translate to there were infinite options in between.
But just for analytical purposes, let's keep it simple and say, you know, if these two options give us an answer, maybe it would be similar for the ones in between as well.
So if we do a fast exit, and that's what happened, our military starts packing up, and we know this, we don't have to guess, we know the Afghan government immediately left, And that created a bunch of chaos.
And the only hope of getting the people out, the 30,000 people, the only hope is that the Taliban gives them safe passage.
Now, what are the odds?
What are the odds that the Taliban would give the Americans safe passage?
Well, let's look at human motivation.
Now, we know the Taliban are kind of crazy...
So we think, oh, they'll do anything.
They'll kill anybody, and that's certainly a big risk.
But what is the Taliban's big self-interest?
What do they want more than anything?
The Taliban want more than anything to get American military out of there.
What would be the worst way they could get what they want?
The worst thing they could do is start killing those Americans who couldn't get out or anybody else who wanted to get out.
It's the worst thing they could do.
They've already said that they're not going to go after the interpreters.
I don't know if you can trust them.
I mean, that would be kind of iffy, right?
But they're saying the right thing, which means that they understand where their self-interest is, and they're pursuing it.
If somebody announces, here's my self-interest, and you can look at it yourself and say, yeah, that is your self-interest.
You want us out first, then you might turn into very bad people again.
But at the moment, just stay cool, and you'll get everything you want.
Just stay cool for a month.
Get all the people out.
You'll be fine. Now, could you have depended on that to be true?
Not really, because it's the Taliban, right?
You can't really predict all the way to the end.
But you could predict chaos.
I think that was predictable.
Because you could predict that the government would fall.
That's how human motivation works.
As soon as they're exposed, they're going to take care of themselves and get the hell out of there.
So that's what we ended up with.
But let's say we'd gone the other way and done a controlled, Trump-like withdrawal, where we kept forces there and did an orderly evacuation.
How would that go?
Well, a lot of people are saying, well, that would have worked.
You keep the military, you get all the evacuations done, and then you remove the military.
Very orderly, right?
Makes sense. Pretty much everybody would think that makes sense.
But there's one problem, and it's the place where I differ in assumptions with most of you.
And it happens right here.
I think that as soon as you begin the civilian evacuations, you've signaled to the country that you're leaving.
Why would people who are afraid of the Taliban wait?
What would make them wait around?
I think that the Afghan government falls under both scenarios and all the ones in between.
That's my assumption, which makes me get to a different opinion than you.
What is my assumption based on?
Human motivation. The same human motivation that made the government fall when we left quickly would be exactly the same as would make the government fall if we left slowly.
Because in both cases, they'd say, oh, hell, I've got to get out of here.
One time slowly, one time fast.
But in both cases, that has to do with the people leaving.
It doesn't have to do with the government.
The government would probably bug out about the same time.
So, imagine trying to evacuate people as the government is falling.
And you don't have enough forces, because you've already drawn down.
You can't protect everything.
And I guess we're being told they couldn't protect the embassy, Kabul, and Bagram at the same time.
They didn't have the forces. Couldn't do it.
So they had to make some choices.
They made them. And they were all bad choices.
But, you know, leadership, right?
You've got to make bad choices. If you only have bad choices, you still have to make a choice.
It's leadership. So, I believe that if it had been a slow withdrawal, you would have seen something closer to a civil war.
If the Afghan government had tried to stay and fight, there would have been a civil war, door-to-door.
Probably any people who couldn't get down to the country at that point probably would get killed, because there was no point in not doing it.
So I feel as though the slow withdrawal would have caused the same amount of chaos, because the government was going to fall anyway, and then you would have a civil war, and this might happen before you got people out.
So you might be evacuating people in the midst of a civil war.
Seems worse. Now, of course, it was a civil war.
It just happened in 11 days, so you barely noticed it.
So... Here's how economists debate each other.
And it's different than the way the rest of the world debates each other.
The way economists debate each other is they usually...
Just look for where you have a difference in assumption.
Because economists generally think the same.
They have similar kind of reasoning skills.
They know how to compare the right things.
They know the difference between short-term and long-term.
They know what a sunk cost is, etc.
So the only place we tend to disagree is not in the reasoning so much as in the assumptions.
And so I think the only assumption...
That puts me on a different page from some of you, is the assumption that if we'd done it slow and orderly, the Afghan government would have stayed in business and kept things going.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that's true.
So, in the comments, is anybody persuaded to the following point of view?
That we can't know, from our perspective, as civilians sitting here, we can't know if that was a mistake.
Because we don't know what the other way would have been.
Because you don't know if the Afghan government would have still surrendered so quickly that it wouldn't have made much difference.
Yeah, we're all guessing that.
So, economists like Paul Krugman.
You know, what mistake does Paul Krugman make?
Doesn't he always make the same mistake?
Human motivation? Yes.
All right. I just want to see if...
Oh, somebody says plausible.
I just wanted to see if any of you would agree with me that we really don't have the information or the insight to know how poorly things went.
Now, of course, Trump is doing exactly what Trump should do, which is he's going at this hard.
And, man, you do not want to give Trump this much of an opening because he is just dancing on their graves right now.
I mean, Trump is...
If you wanted to say, like, what is Trump good at?
It's this. Trump is really, really good at spotting an opening that's, you know, got a little weakness and just going in and just killing it.
And he's doing that now, so he's giving some interviews.
And you forget...
It's easy to forget how much we appreciated just the way Trump talks.
Everything he says is just...
Closer to something that's real and raw than what other politicians say.
And even if you hate him and you don't like what he's doing, you still feel there's some kind of weird truth at the bottom of it, isn't there?
Or at least it's his truth.
He's telling you his actual opinion.
Now, of course, there's plenty of hyperbole and fact-checking problems and stuff.
But weirdly, Trump has this strange honesty that comes through in a lot of stuff.
And here's another example.
Trump said, I realized I had a loser, speaking about Mark Milley, the general.
And this is the single greatest embarrassment I've ever seen.
And then he went through the logic of how he would have kept troops there and withdrawn people.
Now, when Trump tells it, he has the advantage of hindsight.
So Trump can tell the story as if he knew all along that the Afghan government would fall in 11 days.
Right? We all act like that.
We all act like we knew that.
Well, we knew that. Pretty obvious.
Afghan government was going to fall in 11 days.
We didn't know that. You didn't know that.
You just knew it was going to fall. Now, if the Afghan government had lasted a few months, probably things would have been fine.
Right? We probably could have gotten people out and the Afghan government would have been, you know, maybe good enough to help get people out.
So... Trump has the advantage of hindsight, but that's politics.
He gets to dance on this one, and he is.
So good job in persuasion, Trump is doing.
And who can argue that he wouldn't have done a better job?
You can't. You can't argue that...
I mean, I can give you an intellectual argument about how maybe he would have done a better job, but you don't know.
You don't know. There's no way to compare.
And it seems to me that Trump was on a faster schedule of drawing troops down.
I don't know how that would have worked out better.
Right? I mean, Trump's claim is that he would have done it faster, but more controlled?
Okay. I think it's just the advantage of hindsight.
I feel as though any president who was in office would have been killed by this issue.
So Trump...
He gets the win that the vaccinations didn't get as widespread as they could have and we're still in the coronavirus problem.
So that's going to accrue to Biden even if there's nothing he could have done about it.
And then the Afghanistan thing is going to look like Biden's problem.
I tell you, what would have been luckier than Trump losing the second term?
Think about it. Think about it.
The luckiest thing Trump ever did was lose the second term.
Because if he'd been president, his whole administration would look like this.
It would look like bad news on coronavirus followed by bad news on Afghanistan.
It would have been terrible. But now Trump gets to say, well, if I'd been there, things would have been better.
He's not wrong. You just don't know.
I mean, he might be wrong. Just no way to know.
All right.
One of my favorite stories of the day is that apparently Larry David and Alan Dershowitz got into a screaming match at a grocery store, which is pretty funny to me.
So can't you just imagine that?
Because it seems exactly like a skit from a Larry David show.
And I hope he turns it into a skit.
Let me make a suggestion.
Larry David, if you're listening.
Alan Dershowitz, if you're listening.
Just put this on curb.
This is a perfect episode.
You probably already thought that.
I don't have to tell you that, right? It's like I think I'm telling Larry David what a perfect episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm looks like.
It looks like this, and I think he knows it.
So if you want to get a lot of people watching your show, invite Alan Dershowitz to just do an episode and just do the scene.
Do the grocery store scene.
I don't know if you know how Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David's show.
I don't know if you know how he scripts it, but he only scripts it approximate so that the actors are kind of doing their own thing and making up lines to a model, but they stay within the model and make up their own stuff.
Wouldn't you like to see...
Alan Dershowitz playing the role of Alan Dershowitz running into Larry David playing the role of Larry David in a grocery store exactly the way it happened.
Wouldn't you like to see that?
Maybe add a few jokes to exaggerate a little bit.
Come on! That would be the best TV. How could you not watch that show?
That would be great.
And here's the thing. It sounds like Larry David is genuinely mad at Alan Dershowitz for supporting Trump.
And here's what you don't want to do.
If you get into a public disagreement with somebody, here's a little tip.
Here's a little tip on managing your public personality.
Don't get into a public argument with the most verbally gifted lawyer...
In modern times.
It might not go well.
Right? Larry David, excellent at writing TV shows and appearing in them.
Excellent. But arguing your case, Alan Dershowitz, a little bit better.
A little bit better. If you wanted somebody to argue to the Supreme Court, who do you pick?
Larry David or Alan Dershowitz?
I think I'd pick Alan Dershowitz.
And here's what Alan Dershowitz said, which...
Became one of the quotes in the press.
So Dershowitz is talking about Larry David and about this situation.
He says, while he was writing bad jokes, I was helping to bring about peace in the Middle East.
Dershowitz told us. What has he done?
Now, how much do I frickin' love this response?
It's actually true.
You know that, right?
That Dershowitz actually did...
Help create peace in the Middle East.
Not as much as Jared and Avi Berkowitz.
But he was part of that...
This sounds like a joke, right?
Larry David wrote jokes, and Alan Dershowitz...
In part because he did have a relationship with the administration and he was a critic as well as a supporter based on where the law went.
He was following the law.
It looked to me like he was just following the law.
I didn't see actually any bias, honestly.
And I would call it out.
It's not like I'm such a team player that I can't identify somebody who's just being a team player.
But I never saw that with Dershowitz.
Did you? Did you ever see Dershowitz say something that was contrary to the law?
Right? Somebody says it's a boring topic for non-Americans.
It probably is. Probably is.
Do non-Americans not know who Dershowitz is or Larry David?
I guess it depends where you are.
But you do need to know those two personalities.
However... Yes...
You don't want to get into an argument with somebody who is contributing in a very productive way, I would guess, to peace in the Middle East.
Right? That's not a fair fight.
One wrote really good jokes.
The other helped solve the most unsolvable problem in the entire world.
Peace in the Middle East.
I mean, we don't have peace in the Middle East, but got a lot closer.
So that was good.
All right. Here's another little tip.
If you're looking to scapegoat somebody and you want to make it look like if there's a big disaster, you want to make it look like somebody's problem, somebody made a mistake, you want to pick somebody who looks like General Mark Milley.
Now, also, Austin, who's the Secretary of Defense, those two guys, standing in front of the public, as sort of the leadership pair, they look dumb.
Now, luckily for me, one of them is white.
Because otherwise you'd be like, you racist.
Why do you say that the black guy is dumb?
I don't say that.
I say that there was a black guy and a white guy and they both look dumb to me.
Now, are they dumb?
Clearly not, right?
Clearly, if you had either of those guys take the SAT test or an IQ test against, let's say, me, they might beat me.
I mean, on paper, they might be smarter than me.
I don't know. Maybe.
But can we agree on this?
No matter how smart they actually are, and I can't imagine you could become a general or secretary of defense without being pretty darn smart, However smart they are, would you agree with the following statement?
That they don't look smart?
Anybody? And again, this isn't racial, because it's a white guy and a black guy, and they both have that same sort of vibe to them.
They just don't make me feel confident.
Right? And they looked a little extra dumb because the Afghanistan situation primes you to think that they're dumb.
And then they act that way and it's just a little too much.
Yeah, they're woke.
Yeah, you know, it's fun to tie that together and say, oh, they're so woke and that's the real problem.
But I'm not so sure.
I'm not sure that's the problem.
All right, here's my next question for you.
If it's true that the vaccinated states have lots of ICU capacity and the unvaccinated states, such as Alabama, are running out of ICU capacity, is there anybody, including my mascot, Anomaly, you know my mascot?
He used to be my critic, but he just became so silly he's more like a clown.
So I feel like he's more of a mascot than a critic at this point.
But... My mascot still thinks that the vaccinations are a mistake.
Is there anybody who at this point...
And this is a question, not a statement.
It's going to sound like it's a rhetorical question, but it's not there yet.
Could we, in the comments, tell me your opinion?
Can we conclude with what we know now that the vaccinations worked?
Now, that doesn't mean you don't need a booster.
So I think of them more as therapeutics.
But did the vaccinated states get a better outcome than the unvaccinated states?
In the comments, tell me, do we have enough data yet to know just in terms of the ICU traffic?
All right, I'll just limit it to just ICU capacity.
Can we say that vaccinations work just for ICU capacity?
Let's see in the comments.
A lot of people say no.
A lot of people say, not yet.
I don't know that you're wrong.
Because what have I told you from the beginning?
Don't look at one state and don't look at one other country, like Sweden, and think that that tells you something.
Those are illusions.
We so easily can be fooled into saying, oh, Lithuania did one thing and got a good result, so it must be that one thing.
It's not. There are lots of variables going on.
Let me ask you this.
Is Alabama about the same BMI, about the same weight as the rest of the country?
Yeah, you didn't see that coming, did you?
Yeah, if Alabama is also substantially fatter than the rest of the country, no matter what was happening, their ICUs would have much more problem, right?
Now, I don't know how much that's factored into any of this, But, oh, and somebody says that they have a, I'm seeing in the comments, they have a larger black population and we know that they have worse outcomes.
Do we know for sure, and I honestly don't know the answer to this question, do we know for sure that the vaccinations are the difference in the ICU capacity?
Now, I'm leaning toward yes, but So I'm seeing most of you say no, but I feel like most of you are saying no because you're skeptics.
I feel like you're sort of committed to the skeptical position.
So you're saying, well, it's not proven yet.
And I would agree with you, by the way, that I don't think it's proven to a level that I'm willing to say it's just a fact.
But I think we're moving that way.
It feels like we're We're moving in a direction where questioning whether vaccinations helped hospital capacity, I think it's moving in a direction where it will be dumb to question it fairly soon.
But not yet. I would say so far you're on solid ground to generally say we don't know what's happening anywhere or why.
That feels like a pretty good position to be in for a long time.
But over time, that Complete, you know, ambiguous view of the world will start collapsing into some things we know worked and some things...
Or at least science will decide some things worked and some things didn't.
Scott Schilling for his big firm of bosses that killed his stepson with a fentanyl patch on his arm.
Dr. Johnson. So one of my trolls here.
Let's get rid of you. Hide user on this channel.
I can't even tell if these are real trolls.
Like, who would really think that I'm shilling for a pharmaceutical company?
Like, you'd have to be pretty dumb to have that opinion.
And by the way, if there's a pharmaceutical company that would be willing to pay me to shill for them, please contact me.
Make me an offer. I can't imagine how much they'd have to offer.
How much money would I have to take to sell somebody's pharmaceutical stuff?
Let's take the assumption everybody has a price.
Just take that assumption, everybody has a price.
So let's say I have a price.
What would I have to take...
To sell pharmaceuticals to you without telling you that that was what I was doing.
Because if I got caught...
I mean, that's the end of my career and reputation and everything else, right?
So how much would you have to give me?
My current income level and lifestyle, etc.
What would you have to give me?
Somebody said that they might offer $50,000.
Yeah, I mean, what they would have to pay me would be something in the tens of millions.
To bend my ethical construct.
And I'd like to think that they couldn't do it, right?
I'd like to think I'd turn down a billion dollars.
But I also believe in human motivation.
And if you really got offered a billion dollars, you might get flexible.
We all like to think we wouldn't.
I'd like to think that of myself.
I mean, I genuinely like to think that I would turn down a billion dollars.
But until you're in this situation...
You can imagine that cognitive dissonance would get the better of you, and you'd be like, you know, I was totally opposed to this at $10,000, but now that you're offering a billion, I see the wisdom of your argument.
That's what would happen.
You started thinking the other side wasn't as bad, And, well, you know, if they gave me a billion dollars, I could, you know, help people with it, and that's not bad.
You would talk yourself into it.
At some dollar amount, you would talk yourself into it.
But my dollar amount is nowhere near what they would pay, right?
I mean, I would be in the tens of millions.
Are they going to pay me tens of millions when they can get, you know, somebody at anomalies level for $5,000?
Right? I mean, not him because he's on the other side of the issue.
But you can get somebody with a big audience who doesn't have money.
Right? So I tell you all the time that if you have a degree in economics or you understand business and business models, you can see around corners.
So somebody who thinks that I would be taking money to shill pharma products doesn't understand economics very well because you couldn't come up with a price Where that business model makes sense for me.
But you could for somebody who had a big audience and didn't already have money.
So if you're thinking an influencer, let's say on Instagram, is shilling, that's a pretty good guess.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but it's a good guess.
If you're guessing that somebody who's already rich is shilling for a pharma company, it's very unlikely.
I mean, anything's possible, right?
But it's deeply unlikely that I would take...
I mean, do you think I would take $100,000 to shill a pharma product?
Not even close.
Do you think I would take $1 million?
$1 million. Let's say tax-free.
$2 million, so I get $1 million after taxes.
Would I take $2 million before taxes to sell pharmaceuticals to you and not tell you I was doing that?
No frickin' way.
No way. Because a million dollars wouldn't change my life in any way.
I wouldn't even notice the difference.
So learn economics, and you can see around corners.
This is one of those, I mean, clean cases of that.
All right. Let's hope...
I do hit these points too long, don't I? One of the problems with having a diverse audience, you're all over the board in terms of what you know about, etc., is that it's really hard to craft a general live stream that hits everybody's attention span just right.
So I'm aware of that.
And did you notice...
I'm seeing the locals' comments here...
Did you notice the Dilbert comic this week, Dilbert's employer, is doing gain-of-function tests on the employees, trying to take that headline and match it with the Dilbert comic.
And unfortunately, the gain-of-function experiments on the employees, the gain-of-function experiments made them grow tails, which actually made them more efficient, so they liked the tails.
Alright. Somebody says diversity doesn't work.
Why are you saying that?
Is that even related to the topic?
Diversity doesn't work?
What? I would disagree.
Whoever said diversity doesn't work, I disagree.
I agree that it's not a solution, but I disagree it's always negative.
There are lots of situations when having...
More points of view representative gives you an advantage.
Every situation is just different.
I don't think you want diversity for the sake of diversity, but it's a mistake to say diversity hurts you.
It just depends on the situation.
Scott's shtick is starting to get kind of tired, Chris B says.
Well, you know what it is, is that...
My analysis, usually persuasion influenced, I can only talk about the news.
And if the news gets in a rut, it does affect me.
I can't make up news, but maybe I should.
Just looking at some of your comments here.
Thank you.
You need Trump. Yeah, we all need Trump to keep us all fired up.
But I have to admit, I'm going to admit that my life has been a lot calmer.
And I would say that my mental state has been better without Trump.
Can anybody say the same?
Now, I can still wish we had Trump for a variety of topics.
So that's still true.
But as I've said, I don't think there's such a thing as a good president and a bad president.
I think you have presidents that fit the topics of the day and ones that don't.
And I think Trump fits some topics really well.
And then others, you know, like the coronavirus, maybe less so.
All right, more about DeSantis.
He hasn't done much today, has he?
Yeah. Treatment tents in Florida?
Is that what's happening? You know, I wouldn't look too much at the contingency planning states are doing.
Like, we hear some stories about, you know, such and such a state is bringing in, like, refrigerated trucks for bodies and stuff.
That's just smart. You know, preparing for stuff just makes sense.
