Episode 892 Scott Adams: Simultaneous Swaddling and Taking Questions. Get in Here!

Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for the simultaneous waddle. Yes. Every 12 hours you get a little bit more of me. Some would say that's plenty, but I don't think they're good sports. I think a little bit more of me is just what you need. It's just what you need. So come on in here. I'm going to be taking some questions, talking about some stuff, getting you ready for an extraordinarily good night of sleep. In fact, why don't you tell me in the comments if you had a really good sleep last night because I suggested that you would and it would be nice to see your confirmation. So tell me if you had a. Had a really good night of sleep last night. So let's catch up on the news. For the last 12 hours, it's been quite a bit. For example, President Trump did his usual task force press conference and after it, CNN reported that he was, quote, touting an unproven drug. He was touting. That's right. CNN says that the President was touting. He was out there touting around, touting up that drug. But is that really what happened? Was he touting? I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think he was touting. Here's what I think he was doing. I think the President was saying exactly what you and I say. When we listen to the doctors, we make a risk management assessment based on what the doctors tell us. So the President clearly knows it hasn't undergone rigorous tests. He does know there are anecdotal reports that it works, some that it doesn't. He knows that. He also knows that it's been used for years for other purposes. So we know it's well tolerated. He knows that. So a risk assessment is that it might work. Doctors say they take it themselves because, well, it might. And the risk, if you're taking it for a short term especially the risk, is almost vanishingly small. And it might work. There's some indication it might. So is the President touting a drug or is he simply looking at what the evidence is that we're all looking at exactly the same data and saying, well, it's a risk management situation. Would you take the risk, which is nothing, for a potential gain which could save your life? Yeah, it's kind of easy actually. My guess is that the only reason the President is being a little more full throated about this is because maybe we have more of it. He said we have 20 something million doses. I don't know if they're in the right place, but I guess we got some coming in. Now here's the fun part about this. When the President puts down a stake anywhere and says, this is what I think is true, what's the natural thing that happens? If the President says the sky is blue, CNN says it's not blue, not at night. And they'll say why it's not blue. So the President has, I don't know if he planned this, but if it turns out this hydroxychloroquine actually works, if it works, because I'm going to get the same treatment his no matter how many times I say if it works. Unproven, only anecdotal. You know darn well that my troll future critics are already planning to say, you were out there touting it, Scott. You touted it. And then I'll say, I did not tout. There was no touting. I simply explained the same data that you're looking at anyway. So the President is forcing CNN to take an increasingly strong stand against believing in the drug. So they're not against the drug, they're against believing in it without sufficient scientific evidence. Now, of course, we all agree with that, right? If you had a choice, if he had a choice of lots of high quality studies. Well, yeah, we'd all take that choice. If we had that choice, which we don't. So I think it's hilarious. If it turns out the drug works, then the President will have forced CNN into mocking him for something that turned out to be right. And there's going to be a lot of mocking because as soon as I heard him say it, I thought, well, there's the whole news cycle right there. The CNN and MSNBC will say it's unproven, it's unproven. I say it's unproven. As if the President doesn't know that because he said it's unproven. And they're going to act like he doesn't know it even though he says it directly. Is it by imagination or did the number of deaths from coronavirus decline today? It's not the end of the day, but it looks like we're going to end down right now. The other day I said don't get excited about, you know, one day in a row that it looks like it's going down because then the very next day it was up, of course, but it's down again. It's feeling like we're starting to top not topping in infections, but topping in deaths, which could be because the hydroxychloroquine works? I don't know. Could be. So David angel sends me this question. If you want to ask me a question, go to my. Go to my top tweet on Twitter and you could just put the questionnaire. I'll read it. So there's this graph that I've seen, but I don't know to believe it or the source. Anyway, it's a graph that shows the amount of pneumonia by each season or each year in the United States. And it purports to show that the number of cases of pneumonia are way, way, way down this year. Which would mean what? Well, first of all, I don't know where this came from. It's just something I saw on Twitter. So I have no idea if the data is right. But if the data is right that the number of pneumonias or things that we call pneumonia is way down, could it be that we have a counting problem going on and that what we think are coronavirus, maybe we used to think are pneumonia and vice versa? So I do think there's probably some issue about how we're counting things. And I will say once again, it seems that we've gone yet one more day without the dire consequences. And every day that it's. Every day we get closer to the predicted peak, which is still, what, 10 days away. And it's not looking dire yet. The skeptics are getting a little happier. And I have to admit, there's part of me. There's part of me that can see that other movie just as clearly as I can see the one that I spend most of my time in. So the one I spend most of my time in is. This is pretty bad. But I think between science and our good work, we'll get a handle on it. So I don't think the death toll will be bad. I think the risk is very, very high. But I think humans will prevail. But that still puts me in the movie that says it's a gigantic problem that could have killed, you know, 2 million people if you did everything wrong. But the people who say it was never a problem and it's all just in your mind and it's just a hysteria. You can't rule them out yet because so far we don't have even one hospital over capacity. Right. But again, 10 days from now, it could be a Hellscape and it could look like you, you know, World War Zombie. And the experts say that's going to happen. They seem pretty clear that in 10 days we're going to be super unhappy. I can see both movies at this point and they are both so clear. Can't you see both? I'm not saying that one is definitely going to happen and the other isn't. I'm saying as of this point in time, I can see them both just like they both exist. And it's sort of a Schrodinger's cat situation where it's as if those two futures already exist and the only thing we're going to do is choose a path. We get to perceive either one, but they're both there just waiting for us. And you can go either way. You see in the comments, people are saying the same thing. Normally, one of those paths is not clear. My normal situation is that one of them is clear and the rest are fuzzy. But there are two that are really clear. All right, Joe Rogan made a little news. He was did his interview with Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan. They were talking about Joe Biden being mentally degraded. And Joe Rogan said, you know, that he would vote for President Trump over Joe Biden because he didn't think Biden was capable of anything. So the Joe Rogan take on it is the same as most of yours, I think, which is, if you're being honest, if you just step away from the political filter for a while, you're just being honest. You can see it, right? You can see that Biden's not operating with a full clip or something. I love the fact that Joe Rogan makes news just by talking about who he might vote for. You know, you've made it when it's a world headline, that you were just talking with a friend and say, yeah, my vote for Trump over then. And so it's a headline. I mean, he's doing something right if that's world news. So I now have my second idiot that I've blocked for misstating what my prediction is of the death toll and then criticizing me already before we even know which way things end up, already criticizing me for being wrong for the things that they misremembered. I said so now two people have been blocked for doing that. There are going to be a lot of them. I'll bet there will be two dozen people that I'll have to block because they will be damn sure I said something else and that I need to admit how wrong I am. Speaking of admitting wrong, Dr. Drew did something amazingly brave, which is he did a special little periscope today, just apologizing to the public for his take on the coronavirus being a little bit Too. Maybe a little too optimistic and comparing it a little bit too much to lesser problems, and I thought that was pretty impressive, I gotta say. You don't really expect anybody in the public eye to just say, yep, I got that one wrong. Yeah. So credit to Dr. Drew for acknowledging that. Now, I've said, I said before, I don't think he was that far off a Dr. Fauci, was he? Because if you look at where Fauci's evolution was, it's not that different from Dr. Drew. So, you know, if you're wrong, but you also were pretty darn close to the top expert in the world who everybody's looking to, that's not the wrongest you can be. I mean, you could be a lot more wrong than that. You know, even. Even if the. The explanation turned out to be suboptimal, you could be a lot more wrong in your life than that. All right, did anybody confirm if the. The death count actually went down from yesterday? Because I think it went down, like, sharply. You know, we're still dealing with relatively small numbers. I mean, it's a big number if you happen to be one of the ones who died. But, you know, a thousand can bump around, you know, 30% a day. All right, some of these, I don't understand the context. Somebody said, how can a billionaire fund wenhub to improve. That's my startup. To improve communication in real time cooperative situations. Well, that would be more of a conversation. But if you know, any billionaires who want to have that conversation, send them my way. How can we have a trustworthy 2020 election? I think we're way beyond the point where anybody trusts anything, aren't we? Because we don't trust our experts, we don't trust our politicians, we don't trust the news. Don't trust anybody, do we? Who do we trust? So the question how can we have a trustworthy 2020 election is we can't. It doesn't matter who wins. The other side is going to say there was cheating. And they'll have a good argument. They'll probably have a good argument. Did you notice the change in tone for today's press briefing? Much more positive, to be honest. To answer your question directly, I did not notice. But now that you mention it, was it more positive? Well, I don't know. Are you having the same issue that I'm having, which is the whole ventilator thing? Seems like we should know a lot more than we are. I can't even tell. Just a few days away from the projected peak I can't tell if we're 100,000 ventilators short or we already have too many. Can you, based on everything you've seen, you know, in the press conferences, would you be able to answer this question? Will we be 100,000 ventilators short despite everything we're doing, or do we already have twice as many as we need? I don't think I can answer the question because I just hear confusing numbers that don't seem to have any context, which leads me to believe that maybe nobody knows. Now, there is a little hoarding and there's a question of the government taking control of them to move them where they need to be, which I think is the right answer. They should do that. But could we possibly be less informed about the biggest question? It's the biggest question, and I can't even tell you the continent that the answer is on. Totally unacceptable. How soon before the Trump pills. That would be what I call the hydroxychloroquine. How soon before their standard for treating the coronavirus? Well, I don't know if it'll be standard until we actually have some test results, and that might be a month from now. So I guess there's a test in the United States that will have some results in a month. So it depends what you mean by standard. I think lots of doctors will do off label prescriptions just based on anecdotal stuff. But does that make that a standard? I don't know. I don't understand that question from Kamzilla. 420. Scott, if you could put a single word to all that's happened so far since January, what would it be? Okay, well, you can all play along. So if you had to describe the situation, the coronavirus world situation, in one word, since January, what would it be. About? Transformative. I think it's transformative because so much about the way we think of our world will change. Aside from Christina tickling Chopin, meaning on the piano, what other music soothes you these days? Well, I'm not a music guy. I wish I were. I've never. You know, I can enjoy a hit song for a while before I get tired of it, but I just don't enjoy music. I listen to it sometimes, but only medicinally. I've said this before, so I won't bore the rest of you, but I use music medicinally. So, for example, if I'm working out and I want the time to go faster, I might find some music that's good for working out. But I don't like random Music programming my brain, just because I turned on Sirius and music was coming in. I don't like to be programmed without my consent. Initial remdesivir trial should have concluded last week. Any news? Well, yes, here's the news. There's no positive news, which I think is all you need to know. If you saw the survey of, I don't know, 6,000 doctors were surveyed about what meds they think are working. So that's the most unscientific way you could get an answer, of course, is just asking their opinions. But based on the doctors who are actually doing the work, they thought the Trump pills were the most effective. Again, just anecdotally, but I looked for remdesivir on the list and it was way down the list. Now, I don't know if that just means that most doctors have no experience with it, which you'd have to assume that most have never prescribed it or they've heard things and it's not good. So you're right. Enough time has gone by that we should have at least initial indications that it works. And at the very least, you know, the task force would have heard a little bit early, don't you think? Don't you think the task force is already getting early indications from the trials? They just don't want to tell the public for good reasons. And if the task force were hearing good things about remdesivir, I feel like we would have heard about it now. They wouldn't have said it works, but they might have said we're hearing good things about remdesivir. You know, we hope it ends up the way it started to look. You know, they would have teased that it's looking good, but short of that teasing, I'd have to say probably it doesn't. You know, if you had to bet on it, I think we would have heard about it if it did work. All right, should Trump offer to add a prominent Democrat to the task force? And if so, who? Quick answer. No. No, he should not. He should just do whatever works best. And adding anybody who would be a, I don't know, source of conflict or a mobile or anything. Not during an emergency. Bill Gates conducted an event in 2020 in Wuhan, China, simulated what, six weeks before that? No, I don't believe that. So I'm going to say that. Don't believe. I don't believe. Whatever this is, this accusation. How fast could we realistically move manufacturers back from China? Well, I'll tell you, there are probably a lot of things that are really, really complicated because it would take a long time to build a factory and get approval. And we got a lot of red tape and such. I think we might be able to cut some of the red tape, but there would still be plenty. And so it depends. The things which are easiest to move back are the ones that you could replace with a robot, not an employee. So what you might see, because this trend already has started, is you may see some manufacturing come back, but being done by robots. So it's a mixed bag. Is the answer. What is likelihood of a retroactive review of deaths currently attributed to COVID 19 to determine the actual cause of death? I think it's highly likely that no matter where it comes out, that people will dig in and say it was done wrong. I think so. I think it's a guarantee that people will criticize it. Whether the critics are right or not, we won't know. Is Shakedown street type vending at Dead Show? I don't know what that is. Do I need to wear a mask while walking my dog? Well, it depends how embarrassed your dog is to be out with you. If you ever notice that your dog sort of looks away and feels embarrassed when you're out walking the dog, you better wear a mask because you don't want to embarrass your dog. Can you teach lucid dreaming? I've heard people say that you can. It's nothing I have experience with. Well, I have experience of training myself to do it. And it's just a process of thinking about something. And then sometimes your dream will extend that thought. So there's no real trick to it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But if you think of a certain scenario before you go to sleep and you're dedicated to it, you might dream it. How to reconcile New York City morgues running out of room with an overall lower number of deaths? That's a good question. Here's my guess. Right. So we're hearing stuff that's very conflicting, right? We're hearing that the morgue is overrun. At least in one place. They're putting bodies in a refrigerated truck. At the same time, it seems that there are lower overall accidents in general. So how do you explain that? Here would be my explanation. And this is just a guess. It could be that some hospitals were specializing in coronavirus, so that the hospital that was specializing got all the kinds of cases that people die. So they were just sort of bunched up in one area, but maybe had more to do with that hospital handling the tough cases, because otherwise we'd see it in the other hospitals, and we're not. So that's my guess. So we should still see some problems upcoming. Maybe. Can the US cancel the debt to China? Well, you know, in the sense that you can do anything, but, you know, but if you cancel a debt, then there goes your credit worthiness. So the cost is usually bigger than the gain. Is drama important to the world? Yes. Yes, it is. Drama is important to the world, meaning that if there wasn't some here, naturally we would create some because we need it. You see it in your personal life all the time. People like drama. We kind of like it. And then the news business, of course, operates on that drama. So, yeah, it's important. Maybe you shouldn't be. What to do if you're very sick. Well, that's a doctor question. New top 10 most persuasive words. I'm going to tell you something that's going to make you mad, because I can't tell you the real secret. Somewhere in the world, I came across a pod of hypnotists who created a new word that is so powerful it's crazy. And I can't tell you the word because then you would go find it and you would be sucked into these evil hypnotist schemes. But just trust me, I came across that and I just thought to myself, that is the most powerful word. So they took an existing word and repurposed it. I can't tell you the word. I'm sorry. I just can't. And in repurposing it, they imbued it with power. And it's the most powerful thing I've ever seen. So much so, it could change civilization. But I can't tell you what it is because ideally, it won't escape from its little world. But if it does. Oh, my God. So there's a persuasive word in the wild that is designed better than the coronavirus. And I don't know if that's going to get out, but if it does, if it does get out, like it's a year from now and it's like a national headline or something, I'll tell you what it was, but I don't want to help it because it's truly evil, I'd have to think about some other words. So. That was a terrible answer. Sorry. Will the country be the same when things reverse? No, it won't be the same. There's a question of how much things will change. My guess is we'll be 85% the same. Eventually, not on day one, but we'll sort of revert to 85%. The same. Things that will be different might be temporary, such as no large gatherings. I thought that the era of large group gatherings was going to end anyway, and I thought it was going to sort of end this year because this is the year that drones become extra dangerous. You know, they've been getting more dangerous every year, but at this point, it would be just so easy for somebody with bad intentions to do something bad with a large outdoor crowd, especially outdoor, with some kind of a drone attack. So I've been thinking that large group events were probably going to go away, and this will just push them a little further. Now, if I had to bet, though, I bet they'll come back in the long run. They might go away, but I think they'll come back in a year. So all of the. All the businesses that are hit the hardest, they're going to be tough. This cost me my job, basically. I don't know the outcome yet, but when this is done, I don't expect many newspapers to remain in business because a lot of newspapers were sort of, you know, they were declining every year from a pretty good profit margin, but they were getting pretty close to the, you know, the edge of where they could stay in business. So I think three quarters of the local newspapers probably are in a business when this is over, which means three quarters of my income just went away, so I'll actually be looking for a job. So in terms of how different will things be? Well, I thought I was just going to retire and keep on doing what I was going to do, but I actually have to look for a job now, like a lot of people will be doing now. I'm not going to starve, so I'm not in any kind of dire straits. But it changed my career. I mean, I will have to retool everything I'm doing, which is, you know, I kind of look forward to it, frankly. It'd be a nice challenge. And other people, you know, the restaurant business, recreation business, a lot of outdoor stuff or anything that was, you know, group activities, it's going to be in bad shape for a long time. But let me. Let me give you the good news. Everybody focuses on the bad news because that's. It's more obvious, more in your face. There's definitely something that's happening to me that I wonder if it's happening to any of you. And it goes like this. You've heard this story about baseline happiness that people sort of. They're Born with a level of happiness that doesn't seem to change too much unless they're just having the worst problems in the world. But generally, you could have a good or bad life and your happiness doesn't seem to change that much. We're just sort of born a certain amount of happiness and. And it takes a lot to move us off of that. And the thing that I've. I'm starting to learn by having everything taken away from me. Meaning. Well, look at the things that. Here are the things that I've lost, you know, temporarily and some permanently. So I've lost my. Because I'm a certain age and risk factor, right? I've lost the ability to go anywhere, to just leave my house. Same with most of you, right. I've lost my ability to, you know, go to the gym, socialize with people, you know, go eat at a restaurant. I mean, all the things that you can't do as well. But here's the thing. If I had a choice, I would of course want those back. But I'm not less happy. And I don't know what's up with that. I think it's just a baseline happiness thing. As long as I eat right and sleep and get some exercise and stuff, that my happiness doesn't change. I mean, if you look at the fact that my entire career just blew up, like, probably half of the people here just had your job blow up, your retirement blow up, so now you gotta, like, dig in again. Now, in theory, that should make me really sad. In theory. But it didn't. And so here's what I found out about myself. And I'm wondering if any of you had this realization. So what I found out about myself is that the stuff I thought I needed to make me happy probably wasn't that important. Now there's some things you just need to do. You need a certain amount of variety. And I think. I think people have to travel a little bit for mental health. But if you don't count the fact that some of it just has an oppressive mental health thing, you got to hold together. But just what do you need? It turns out, I guess I didn't need that much because my life has really slowed down to petting the dog and taking a nap and do some work and talk on Periscope. So the stress of my life, weirdly, even though we're in this, in theory, this should be the most stress I've ever had in my life. But I'm not experiencing it that way. I mean, I definitely have my moments. Same as most of you, where I can get worked up about worrying about something, but it doesn't last too long. So I would say that the disconnect between the things I think make me happy and the fact that most of them just went away, including my career. I mean, think about it. I mean, my career just went away, and I don't feel that sad. You know, I'd be more sad if I was worrying about eating or something, but I'm not. So I think that maybe there's something we learned in this that's important. Somebody also pointed out, imagine how terrible this would have been if we didn't have smartphones and Netflix and screens, because pretty much people are in survival mode just looking at their little screens because they can't talk to people or go anywhere. But it works. Little screens are pretty good. So I'm glad we had this. Glad we had this problem. We had good technology. Let's see. What are the odds that we'll have hundreds of thousands of deaths? Well, the. The experts say pretty good, and I say pretty low. Well, I don't know. I'm not sure if you can calculate odds in this, because my bet is based on us getting really effective really quickly. And so you can't really predict that. So it could be an invention, an insight, a drug or something. But I think we'll be on the lowest of the low side of deaths because we're so darn clever. Why does the model we are told to look at, meaning the model for the coronavirus deaths, continue to give projected numbers that are already proven wrong? I don't know. There are two ways. There are two schools of thought. One is that you adjust your model every day as you've got actuals, and the other is that you're more honest and you say, all right, we're not going to change what we predicted. We'll just change the line of where it actually is so that you can see how bad our model was. It's a little more honest to not update it every day so that people can see what you thought it was compared to what it is. If you update it every day, it feels a little like cheating. All right. How would the world change if we allowed the weak to die? Well, that's a dark question, but I'll answer it. I like dark questions. Here's how the world would change if we allowed the weak to die. We'd have a long argument about what that included, because talk about a system that will eat itself as soon as you get to decide who's Weak, your whole system blows up. So you can't really do that. You know, I have to say one of the strongest things about humanity is that we have these kinds of arguments and that usually what wins is the side of we're going to keep everybody alive no matter what. And we argue whether it's the abortion question or whether it's coronavirus. We always have at least half of the country arguing that there's no gray zone when it comes to life. There's no gray zone. It's like if you can protect it, if it might be a life, if it's arguably a life, if somebody could think it's a life, you protect it. So at least half the country has that impulse. No matter the topic, we're just going to, you know, of course, they may feel differently about guilty life, you know, if you, if you're a murderer or something terrorist. But if you're innocent, half the country is going to work really hard to keep you alive, even if somebody else has an argument why they shouldn't. So I like that about humans. What is your take on plant based yogurt, plant based food? You know, I don't believe anything anymore. So anything I would know about diet is because experts told me and there's no topic in which the experts have been more wrong for more years consecutively than nutrition. So I swear I, I don't know what to believe anymore about nutrition or a lot of things that I rely on the experts for. Do you think putting Adam Schiff on the recovery task force would be a stroke of political genius now? It'd be the worst idea in the world. I'm very much in favor of working with your political nemeses in an emergency, but Adam Schiff is not a political nemesis. There's something wrong with him. Could we agree with that? It's one thing to say, hey, I'm a Democrat, I'm going to fight for my side, or I'm a Republican, I'm going to fight for my side. But that's not what Adam Schiff's doing. Adam Schiff has something that looks more like a mental problem playing out in some kind of political drama. If it looked like it was just a political disagreement and I've tried to reach out. When Chris Cuomo was diagnosed, I'd said some nice words. KATHY Griffin I basically, I've been trying to boost the signal of people I normally wouldn't because it just sends that signal that we're on the same team at the moment. But Schiff doesn't seem like One of them. It's easy for me to like aoc, even if I dislike every policy she mentions, because I think she has good intentions and she's a real politician. Schiff is something else. Whatever's going on with him, it's not about politics. There's just something deeply broken there. I can't put my finger on it. All right. How are Boo and Snickers doing? They're doing great. They're my only company, so they're getting a lot of attention. What do you think will be the main attack on Trump leading up to the election? Everything depends on the coronavirus. Everything depends on it because. And I think that no matter how well the President does, it's always going to be complicated and they'll always be able to say, you should have done it differently, it would have been better. But we can't prove it. You should have done it sooner, even though we didn't know, you should do it sooner either. So they always have something to complain about. I'm guessing it'll be the coronavirus will be the main line of attack. Should the White House press corps be required to wear masks to protect the President? Yes, yes and yes. I can't tell you how my confidence in the system is degraded by seeing the task force and the press conferences not wearing masks and being a little too close to each other. Doesn't that degrade your confidence in their ability? Now, Trump is sort of a one off, and you could convince yourself, all right, he is the President. Maybe you don't want him to look weak and wear a mask and people would make fun of him and it would become a thing. So. So you could make an argument that the President is the one exception, but that doesn't explain the rest of the task force, because since one of the main benefits of the mask is to not infect other people, you could make the argument that the President has been tested twice and they're doing a good job of keeping people away from him. I don't know if they are, but let's say they are. You could make the argument that the President's the only person who doesn't have to wear a mask because we're not worried so much that he'll give it to someone else. The risk is somebody will give it to him. So you would want all the other people around him to wear masks even if he didn't? That's like minimum. And if you wore a mask, too, a little bit better. But you can imagine how he would be the exception. So, yeah, I completely Lose confidence when I see them not wearing masks as of today. You know, up till. Up till now, maybe you can make an argument they didn't need it. War with China. When? Well, apparently we've been in a war with China. They've been killing tens of thousands of Americans per year, but they deny it, so we believe them. Oh, the fentanyl. Totally accidental. Yeah, we'll take care of that. Sorry about all the fentanyl. Yeah. Oh, really? Did we not take care of that already, Bob? Did we? We didn't. We're so sorry. We'll take care of that. We'll take care of that right away. So we're in a war with China. It's just a unconventional one where they're killing us in their own ways. I don't know if we're killing them in our own ways, but I kind of hope so. How long before the vulnerable and the elderly can leave their homes? It's going to be a long time, if I had to guess for myself. All right, so I'm on the. I'm on the barely edge of elderly, I like to think, so I'll be turning 63 in June, but I'm sort of a young 63, I like to think. But even for me with just like a little bit of asthma, it's not like a big deal, but even for me, I think I might be stuck inside for six months, I think. I mean, it could easily be the end of the year and if it went longer, because they say, well, it's only three months left and then we'll have a vaccine, you know. Suppose they say that at the end of the year. I don't know if they would, but if they said that, well, it's going to be tempting to just stay another three months, you know, just be sure. So I think the people who are at risk, at least six months is just a guess. And for other people, I think may will be when some people go back. But beyond that, I don't know. What about the walks? What about the walks? Oh, well, yeah, I could go out for walks. So it's a little. It's a little ambiguous now whether I'm even allowed to go for a walk because I'm not sure that's allowed. Right. Technically, we're not really allowed. Barnes law. Help him understand. So, yeah. So, you know, there are a number of people, Adam Townsend and Robert Barnes, and there's some people who still have taken the. You know, this might be overblown and this isn't going to be as bad as predicted, there's still some really smart people on that side, which is what keeps that movie alive for me. Completely alive. If a month from now, if a month from now we're saying, man, it just was nothing, we ended up fewer people died than were killed because of shutting down the economy. If it turned out to be the case, I wouldn't even be a little bit surprised at this point. At this point, it would not surprise me to find out the whole thing was overblown, but only because we're so good at mitigating, not because it wasn't a real risk. Another depression? Nope. I don't think so. I don't think so. I actually am still very much on the side of a quick recovery. You can go to the park in your state. People are saying, back to work. Yeah. All right. I think that's all I got for tonight. And I think that you should have a terrific, terrific night of sleep. I'm going to give you some brain hacking tips. So those of you who stay to the end of these periscopes, you get a little extra because the other people bailed out. When I started reading questions, they're like, I don't want to hear the questions. So here's some brain hack tips. There are. The main way that you can hack your brain, which is rewiring your brain, is by association. And I'll give you an example. Let's say there's a TV show that you've never been interested in. And in my case, it's that TV show, Golden Girls. It's a very old show. If you're a certain age, you remember it, it's called Golden Girls. You can still find it, you know, in reruns for hundreds of years. And Christina recently, when, when we could still see each other at the same time, started liking it. And, you know, she enjoyed watching some of the old reruns. Now I enjoy, of course, being with Christina. So I would agree to watch that show because I would be spooning her and we'd be watching it on the iPad and it was just so comfortable and wonderful. So I didn't care about the show because I cared about the experience. It was more about just lazing around and spooning Christina. But because that's such a good experience, I started to love the show. And if you think that this is a sort of a one off, then you don't understand how brains work. That simple association, it was a thing that I only associated with one thing, which was spooning Christina. And so since that was so much Fun. I started to like the show. Now, this is always the case. If you associate things together, those associations become your new programming, the opposite of that. And so you can change. I've actually experimented with this, by the way, over the years. I've experimented to see if I can change what I thought was a basic preference. So, you know, you have a favorite color and there's a food you like, you have these preferences. And I've actually experimented quite a few times. It's something I've done for years to see if I can make myself like something that I don't like or dislike, something that I really liked. And I've done it dozens and dozens and dozens of times. It's just easily reproducible in both directions. You can actually just rewire your brain to like different things. You just have to work at it. So you have to reward yourself when you do it if it's something you want to like and if it's something you know. Take the example of. I was very hooked on eating Snickers candy bars, but after I stayed off of them for a while, I just completely lost it. And something went from my favorite thing in the world and I consciously rewired it to something that I look at and I go, why would I even put this in my body? Like, I can remember what it tastes like and I'm still not interested in it. Complete rewiring. So you can rewire your brain that way. The other way you can do it is by contrast, because your brain is a contrast engine and a pattern recognition engine. And so if you want to, let's say, if you want to like something, think about it in contrast to the worst alternative. So you can actually talk yourself into liking something by thinking of it in the context of something bad. And so. So manage your contrasts because they're optional. So it's the trick that a real estate broker will use. You know, the real estate broker will take you to a really bad listing. You'll be like, I can't live here. And then after several bad ones, the real estate agent will take you to a nice one. And then you're all primed. You're like, I gotta have this right now. And you're like, yeah, I gotta sign this deal right now. Because those other ones were so bad, I only saw one good one. So that's using the concept of contrast. As soon as you saw one that looked good, you were sold. Now, if the broker had done it the other way, which is to show you some that are a little out of your Price range first, and they're really good. And then show you that average one that you could afford, you wouldn't want it. You might even change your mind about buying a house at all, because you'd be like, ugh, the only one I can afford is so bad compared to these other good ones I saw. So you can manage your own contrast by simply choosing what you're thinking about. So whenever you have the option, just manage the thing you're thinking about next to the other things, manage their contrast, and that will reprogram you. So those are a few tricks right there. And you also want to use the trick of associating things with specific things. I told you, in the context of trying to get a good night's sleep, you only want to use your bed for sleeping and or adult activities. But you don't want to use your bed as the place you go to watch movies and stuff like that, because then your brain will think, oh, I'm in bed. This is the time I wake up to watch a movie. So make sure that you have triggers in your life that only are associated with one state. For example, I also teach in my book how to Fill Almost Anything and Still Win Big, that if you want to exercise because you know it's good for you, but you get home from work and you just don't have any energy, and you're like, I worked all day. I know I should exercise. I just can't do it. The trick that I teach is to put on your gym clothes and especially your athletic footwear. Now, assuming that you don't wear your sneakers or your running shoes all day anyway, if it's an unusual feeling, meaning that the only time you have this kind of footwear on is when you exercise, that association will trigger your desired exercise. So you can be not in the mood at all and say, ah, but at least I can put my sneakers on. And you put them on and you walk around a little bit, and suddenly, suddenly, just because you dressed for it, it'll trigger you into that state. So that's another mind hack is find little triggers that you can associate with just one state and then reinforce them and reinforce them until you can use that trigger to reproduce that state. The other brain hack, of course, that I talk about too much is talent stacking. You have a certain set of talents and then you intelligently layer new skills on top. You don't have to be the best in the world, just things that fit together really well. That becomes a brain hack, because all new ideas are really old ideas. Just combined. So for example, if you knew something about economics and something about art history, to pick two ridiculous examples, you might notice something in one of those fields that gives you an idea for the other field. It's like, oh, in economics we think of it this way. Our historians never think of it this way, but they could. And so it seems like a new idea, but really most ideas come from other fields. So when you combine your talent stack and add several unrelated skills together that just work well together toward some end, you create the ability to be more creative simply because you held in your head more variety of patterns and things. And then you say, oh, that's like macrame. It's like, oh, that's like playing the drums. Oh, that's a little like this. So you can hack your brain to be more creative simply by adding talents from unrelated fields. That's how it happens. And I could probably talk all day about brain hacks, but someday you got to get to bed. And you remember that since I suggested that you would have a tremendous night of sleep. And you can remember me counting to 20. If those of you who are there to be, to be hypnotized into being able to do self hypnosis, just count to 20. When you get to 20, you will be relaxed and drift off. And between now and the next time I see you in the morning, 12 hours from now, have a great night's sleep and I will talk to you in the morning.