Episode 937 Scott Adams: Uncanny Valley of Gullible Zombies, Funny Biden Tweets, Disappearing Videos

Hey, everybody, come on in. Yeah, it's time. It's time for one of the best parts of the day. Well, one of the two best parts of the day, because sometimes I'm on here at night, too, and I know what you're all waiting for. Yeah. Yeah. You're waiting for the simultaneous sip. And it doesn't take much to get ready for that. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen, jugger flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join you now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine. End of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. All right, anybody who's good at math, how many people have died in the United States from coronavirus so far? 54,000. How many people are dying per day? I actually don't know the answer to that. Is it 2000 ish per day? Is that the number? And if we open up the economy even slightly, will that number go up or will it go down? Well, I think it's planned to stay the same. Right. I believe the whole idea. I think the whole idea of the gradual reopening of the economy is that we're not going to try to drive the number down to zero. We're just going to try to make it not rise so fast it crashes our system. Right. So let's do the math. 2,000 people a day, and we'll add that to the existing 54,000. Can somebody check my math on the per day? Is it about 2,000 a day? So I'll be checking. So right now we're talking gross. I'll get back to that later. So somebody give me that number in the comments. But let me just walk through the math. Yeah, Per day, I think it's a couple thousand, right? Yeah, about 2,000. So if we assume that the target is to keep that the same, the target is not to make that go to zero, because we don't have any practical way to do that. And also open the economy. So, 2,000 a day. So over a typical month, let's say 30 days, how many people is that? 60,000. Right. So 30 days times 2,000 people. So we're on a rate that our planned rate of death. It's a planned rate. The actual plan is to lose 2,000 people a day. So let's see, that would be. May would be 60,000. June would be another 60,000. July would be another 60,000, and then August would be another 60,000. Right. Somebody says 2,700 per day as of yesterday. Let's just use 20, 65 yesterday. Let's just round off and use 2,000. So if you have four months of 60,000 deaths, you've got 240,000 deaths in the future. So that's 240,000 on top of the 54,000 we already have. And of course, it's not going to end in August. Nobody thinks that. So it's going to keep going. So the minimum number seems 300,000. Right. Am I way off base? So here's the statement. The statement is that the plan, the actual official plan that nobody's hiding, is to lose over 300,000 people. Am I right? We usually have 50 to 60,000 die per week. That is incorrect. That's the world. I think that might be the world. Somebody says, yes, you were off base, but which assumption did I get wrong? Now, we're not talking about net deaths. I'm talking about coronavirus specifically. So I'll try to clarify when I'm talking net and when I'm talking gross. So right now I'm talking only gross, total number of coronavirus deaths. All right? So I'm seeing some people saying no, and some people say yes. So I don't know. It looks to me like the plan is to lose somewhere between 300,000 and maybe half a million people in the United States. Right. And that's with still a lot of work. That's sort of our best case. I don't know. And why am I the only one saying this? There's something wrong, right? So somebody is shouting at me in all capitals. Who is this? Grandmother. Grandmother. You're shouting at me at all capitals. No, you are wrong. But because you say grandmother in your handle, I'm not going to block you because you might be new here, but the cardinal sin on my periscopes is to simply say the sentence, you're wrong or just wrong. And I generally block people for that because it doesn't help. It's just taking up space. And then I can't read real comments. So give me a reason. If there's one of my assumptions that I got wrong, just tell me what it is. I'm open to the argument. Open to the argument. Just check my math. That's all. I'm asking you to check my math. I'm not arguing. I'm not telling you I'm right. I'm asking you to check my math. Somebody says that is wrong, Scott. Well, I'll assume that you didn't hear that warning before I issued it. How much for all causes of mortality? Well, that's a different question. Which might be low. What is the alternative? I don't see any. I don't see any alternative. All right, so it's interesting. Now, why are some people saying every day the total is 8,000? Because you know that's not true, right? You must be talking about the. The planet number, not the country number. Somebody says it's a curve, not a straight line. That is incorrect. It is a curve if you let it be a curve. But the explicit plan is to take the curve and flatten it. What do you call a flat curve? A flat curve is a straight line. So the plan is to take the curve that is bent, flatten it into a straight line that will probably be around 2,000 deaths per day, and just ride that straight line. Because apparently that's not enough to overwhelm our hospitals. So as long as the hospitals are not overwhelmed, apparently we're willing to do that. Somebody says you're Kim Unwrong, which was. That is funny enough not to get you blocked. You will not get blocked if you disagree with me in humorous ways. All right, your estimate is correct. What is the problem? Well, the. I did not express it as a problem. I'm expressing it as, why is it not being reported that way? Why is the news not saying, okay, we're online. It looks like our collective consensus opinion is we're going to try to flatten the curve. That will mean that the per day stays constant. It's going to be about what it is now, because, you know, why not just tell us that. That the plan is to lose 300 to 500,000 people. Now, obviously, at the same time, we'd be working as hard as we can to come up with therapeutics and vaccines and stuff like that. But I don't think there's anybody who can tell us which of those is going to work and how well. And so the plan might involve trying as hard as we can to change the plan as we go. That would make sense, but at least the current projected path of this is 300 to 500,000 people lost. All right, let's talk about this horrible and yet hilarious Joe Biden story about the MeToo accusations. Now, the simulation is just delighting us with this story because not only does it turn out that there's some corroborating evidence that suggests that even back in the 90s, that this woman had been talking about some bad activity with Biden as her boss at the time. And the way that we know that is because somebody found out that her mother had made a had called into the Larry King show and talked generically about it. And somebody found the tape. So they actually found the tape from the 90s where the accuser's mother called in and said, hey, you know, if there's, I don't know if she specified her daughter, but she was saying that if she respected her boss, who was important, that she was a staffer, what could she do? Now here's the fun part about it, that that video was on cnn. So cnn, the people who most want to protect Biden, at least on some days, at least because he's a Democrat, they had the evidence for this and they didn't find it. It was found by a conservative group. So I guess here's a funny statistic that tells you everything you need to know. I think this was on the FOX News site. According to one analysis, CNN waited 24 days to cover the allegations against Biden. They didn't mention a thing for 24 days. Now, is that normal? Is it normal for CNN to hold back if somebody's been accused of a me too allegation? Well, I guess it depends who it is because by the same analysis, CNN published nearly 700 articles about allegations against Brett Kavanaugh in the 19 days from when they became public. So in 19 days they printed 700 articles about those fake allegations against Kavanaugh, and yet in 24 days after the Biden allegations, they printed none. And it should be worth noting that the Kavanaugh allegations had no credibility whatsoever and they still got 700 articles out of it. And the Biden allegations are completely credible. Completely. The person's credible. You know that they were in the same room lots of times. Now we have a contemporaneous report that she was talking about at the time. It's not something she just made up to change politics. And obviously she's a Democrat. She's not even a Republican. She's obviously a Democrat. So if you're asking yourself, Scott, are you making too much of this allegation of bias in the media? No, no, I'm not making too much of it. It's pretty plain. Apparently, actress Susan Sarandon, who I respect on many levels, you know, everybody always makes fun of the famous people for getting involved in politics, and I do as well. You know, there are plenty of famous people who are just ridiculous people. They just don't see the world clearly. I'm Glad that they have passion about causes, but they often will look ridiculous because they're not doing their homework. They're not very bright, they're just not well rounded people. But that's not true of all of them. And I like to point this out because every time somebody says you can't be a celebrity and say, and add to the political conversation, I always say, doesn't it depend? I mean, doesn't it really depend? It's not like they're all the same. So whether or not you like Susan Sarandon's politics, I would say she is solidly in the category of people you should at least pay attention to. I think she's earned it. Even if you disagree with everything she says, she is a serious person who appears to be smart, who appears to be, you know, to care about the country, care about all the right stuff. So when she has an opinion, I think she deserved, I think she's earned it. I say the same thing about Alyssa Milano, which is you could disagree with everything she says, but I think she's earned through work, she's earned some attention. You can still disagree with her. Anyway, Susan Sarandon is now anti Joe Biden in the sense that she's believing the accuser. Now, speaking of censorship, so CNN obviously embargoed that story. So that's just, you know, blatant censorship to influence politics. But there's another story. I'm not sure I believe this one yet. So this next story is in the category of things which, because I think there's a story that the Joe Biden video disappeared in the archive. So I think there are two stories of videos mysteriously disappearing. I may have this wrong, but I think the CNN video or the, at least the audio, video and audio of the Larry King episode, I think it disappeared in the Google Play archives. Just sort of disappeared. All the rest of them are there, but that was missing. And then in an unrelated story, or is it unrelated, YouTube has removed, censored and removed the promotional video of the company that makes that far UV light that is inserted down the trachea, which is obviously the thing that the President was talking about, the UV light on the lungs in order to make it harder for the fake news to be debunked. They remove the video of the company that's doing the exact thing that the President was speculating about. Because if you remove that, then the people who believe the fake news about the president suggesting people drink disinfectants as if that happened, they don't have any alternative story. So you could Say, no, no. He was talking about this technology. You know, you can see it on the Internet. It's far UV light. Go take a look at it, and then you go look for it. It's just not there. Can you believe that? Can you believe that they just removed the video? Now, of course, their story is that it violated some standards, but do you think there are any other medical claims on YouTube that they didn't remove? Of course, it's probably full of medical claims because the Helite did not make a claim that it works. It didn't do that at all. It simply showed what they're proposing. It described why they think it could work. But it makes no claim that they've tested it and it works. They just know it works against viruses in the lab. So why would you take down a video that doesn't make a definitive claim? It just says, hey, here's some technology that we're looking into. Really? And it's not even the stuff they're looking into. Isn't even controversial because it's not like we were wondering if UV light kills viruses. That part we already know. It's already in use. It's a commercial product already. So we're watching this amazing situation where one day there was a time when I think people would say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, the news is biased. And I think we all, on some level, everybody knew that the news was a little biased, at least in recent years. But this is not that. Whatever. This is where videos are being removed. That's not bias. There's no reasonable way you can explain that away by people having different opinions. This is not a question of opinion. This is people manipulating the political process in ways that should be jailable. Now, there's no law against removing a video from your own library, but it should be jailable. Like you can imagine that there would be a law against it. There isn't. But it's easy to imagine that would be a jailable offense if you did it just to confuse people. So here's what is happening over at cnn. I think there was something that was supposed to print that didn't. Hold on a second. Yeah, I didn't print my third page of notes. Hold on. All right, I'm back. So Joe Biden had a funny tweet. And I'm going to give Joe Biden credit because, you know, I like to talk about no matter what side people are on, I like to call it out when they use good technique. Technique in terms of persuasion or communicating. So Joe Biden had the following tweet, which I give him a grade of A. And he said, I can't believe I have to say this, but please don't drink bleach. Now, of course, he's playing on the fake news as if the President actually had ever suggested such a thing. But in the context of a tweet and in the context of the political silliness, I'll give that a pass. So I don't think tweets have to be technically accurate. And in fact, tweets can be ridiculously inaccurate as long as they're also funny. Because then you say, okay, I get it, it's a joke. It doesn't have to be technically accurate. So I would say, solid tweet, Joe Biden. I would also say, there isn't a chance you wrote this tweet yourself, because here's the tell. So the first part of the tweet is, I can't believe I have to say this. Now, where and how often have you heard that phrase, I can't believe I have to say this. Well, that has become sort of a common tweet joke form. So, in other words, if you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you would know that that's a familiar way to start a joke tweet. I can't believe I have to say this, but. And then you do the funny part. Now, what are the odds that Joe Biden himself had used Twitter enough to know that this is a thing to start your joke with? I can't believe I have to say this. The answer is, there's no chance of that. There isn't the slightest chance that on his own, he knew that this was an Internet thing to say, and he was just using the casual, current way that people talk on the Internet. No, this was written by somebody younger. Somebody much younger wrote this tweet for him, which is not a problem, by the way, because the President, I'm sure, has some tweets that are suggested or written. There's no criticism in that. I'm just saying that his staff did a good job of the tweet. So I tweeted back to him, and I don't know how to say this with the requisite amount of modesty. So can I have a pass? Can I be issued a pass to brag about myself in public for a specific, useful purpose, which would be useful to you. So I'm only going to do it because I know it doesn't make me look good, but it's the only way I can communicate to you something useful And I want to do that. So I need you in the comments to say you have a pass to brag about yourself on this topic. Then I won't feel bad. Okay. Okay, we got it. Okay, so one of you has given me a pass. And it goes like this. This might be one of the funniest tweets I've ever written. Now, I don't think you're going to think it's so funny. I just love it. I just love my own tweet. And it's because there's a lot of technique in it. So it's the technique that I want to describe to you so that you can adopt it. So after Joe Biden said, I can't believe I have to say this, but please don't drink bleach, I tweeted with my own comment. I retweeted and I said, the people who dwell above ground, thank you for your plain spoken basement wisdom. I'll just let that sit there for a while. The people who dwell above ground, thank you for your plain spoken basement wisdom. Now, let me tell you why I think this is so clever and thank you for the pass because I wouldn't be able to brag about how good this is in public without you having granted me that pass. So thank you. Now, how many times have I talked to you about the benefit of seeing your ego as a tool? It's not who you are. You can dial it up and you can dial it down. So in this case, you can see me using ego as a tool. I need to brag to you just to convey some information that would be useful to you. So if I were worried about how you would see me, I'd say, it's obvious you don't want to brag in public. Everybody knows that. It's a bad. Look, I'm a public figure. Nothing good about this can happen. But because I see ego as a tool, I can just say to you, can you give me a pass? I'm just going to do this. I'm doing this impolite thing just for a purpose that will be good for you. So you can see it in practice. All right, so here's what was good about my tweet reply. When I said, the people who dwell above ground, thank you for your plain spoken basement wisdom. The first thing is that for writing humor, when you can substitute interesting words for common words, you should do it. Because in the first part, I say, the people who dwell above ground. If I had replaced the word dwell with lived, the people who live above Ground. Do you see how it just lays there? You see how the word dwell just brings it alive? So the sentence comes alive when you see the word dwell, because you know that there's something sort of interesting coming. So that's the first trick. Dwell instead of lived or resided, which would be boring words. And then I said, above ground. Now, the first part of the sentence, I've reframed the situation in the fewest words you've ever seen a reframe happen. So Biden is tweeting funny things that are indeed funny from his secret bunker, basement. Now, even though we make fun of him for being in the basement, Joe Biden is not like the normal people you make fun of in the basement. Now, normally you make fun of people in the basement because they're living at home and they have not succeeded at anything, and they're eating chips and they're sitting in their underwear in the basement. But there's nothing about Joe Biden that fits that model, right? He's a hyper, successful older person who's not living with his parents, so you can't really lump him in with basement dwellers. So what I did with my reframe here is I said the people who dwell above ground, where I immediately painted you a movie. And as soon as I said that, the people who dwell above ground, couldn't you immediately see a picture, and you saw a house, and then you immediately saw under it, Joe Biden, and you saw the people who were walking around above ground, and then suddenly you saw, yeah, that is funny. There's some people who live above ground and there's some people who live below ground. And of course, then your mind goes to the. What was it, the time machine, H.G. wells and the Eloy and whatever, and people who evolved underground. So anyway, in a very few words, I simply painted a picture of people who live above ground. The good people. You know, I don't say the good people, but you automatically say, well, I think the good people are probably the ones living above ground. They got sun and everything. Just automatically you think if you have to live underground, just, you know, in your uncritical mind, you're saying, well, whoever's living underground is not killing it. They're not crushing life if they have to live underground. There's something going on there. So that was just the first few words of the tweet, the people who dwell above ground. And what I've done is I've sort of humorously painted a picture where the above ground people are the smart, good ones. Without even saying it because your brain automatically goes to well above ground. That's got to be better. That must be the smart people. And then I said, we thank you for your plain spoken basement wisdom. Now here's the technique there. Have you ever heard the words plain spoken basement wisdom in that order? Have you ever seen those three words together? The answer is no. In your entire life, you probably have never seen, I'm guessing, these three words in this plain spoken basement wisdom. So that's another technique. So all the words are easy to understand, so you don't have to stop and say, oh, what's that mean? What's he mean? They're just ordinary words, words, but they've never been combined in this way. And if you look at the difference between a professional writer, somebody who's actually succeeded, and somebody who's just good with words, but they don't have that X factor, that extra thing that makes somebody a successful professional writer, you would note that the people who are just good at writing will rarely write words that you haven't heard before. In other words, every sentence fragment is something you say to yourself. I've heard that. So they'll write, bob went to the store and bought bread. And you'd say to yourself, well, I feel I've heard a sentence like that a million times. And even though they're put together in all the right way with the right grammar, they've got a point. They've got a beginning, a middle and end. You could do everything right. But it's not going to look like good professional writing if every part of it you think you've seen before in different contexts, but you think you've seen it all before. You have never heard the words plain spoken basement wisdom before. And so your brain automatically goes, oh, something new. And so you pay attention. Now, what also makes this funny is that if you go against somebody's strength, that's the best thing you could do as a political attack. You want to take out their strength because their weakness is already weakness. It's probably doing its own work, just being its weakness. So Joe Biden's strength is that he seems to be this ordinary Joe who tells it like it is. And there's no artifice, there's no artificial anything about him. He's just plain spoken Joe Biden. So I'm going with his strength, except I'm redefining it as basement wisdom. Now, as soon as you hear that, what do you think about his wisdom when I framed it as basement wisdom? Because there's no reason a basement needs to be an insult that is just literally where he is. But your brain uncritically thinks, wait a minute. Basement wisdom does not sound as good as above ground wisdom, if you know what I mean. You know the old joke about going to find the yogi or to find your guru, you have to always climb a mountain. You're always climbing a mountain to find wisdom. Wisdom is high, right? Wisdom is up in heaven. Wisdom is at the top. Story of a skyscraper where all the CEOs are. Wisdom is near the top of everything. So by calling it basement wisdom, I've insulted it without using an insult because your brain added the insult because you thought basement wish wisdom. So what is good about this is that it reframes and then it does it with words that you haven't seen in this order before. Interesting words. And it does it very, very quickly. They're just one sentence on your own. So that's what I wanted to teach you. Those are your techniques so that you can use on your own. And by the way, the way I write these things is I often write them with ordinary words first. So the first sentence would have. No, zip it probably. I don't remember, but it was probably something like. It was probably something like the people who are living in houses appreciate your wisdom or something like that. And it would have said the same thing. But then the second pass, I go, okay, what would be a funnier word than reside? Dwell. Dwell is just a funny word. And you know when you hear it, you go, dwell. That's a funny word. All right. I am frankly amazed at what CNN is doing with their fake news. So the way they're covering the fake news about the Clorox stuff is that they're using the word ingesting that the president never used. So there's no point at which the president. That's a block. There's no evidence. And of course, the president didn't do it. He did not use the word ingest. If the president had said, hey, doctors, what do you think about the idea of ingesting disinfectants? Well, everybody in the world would say, ingesting. That sounds like you mean drink it. But he didn't say ingest. He said inject now. And then he talked about the lungs, and he was talking about in the context of the light and everything. So inject is actually what happens. The intubation tube goes down your trachea and in some cases might go all the way into the lungs. That's being discussed as well. And they actually inject something into your body down your mouth, and then they disinfect using light. Or there's actually talk about different aerosols that could be bad for the virus, but not for your body. So Sienna uses the word ingest in their headlines. That is so, so illegitimate. So illegitimate. But here's the funny part. It's the people who believe it. I mean, if you believe that the president of the United States recommended drinking Clorox and Lysol, what does that say about you? Because you think the people who believe that think they're saying something about the president. But if you were just sort of. Back up for a moment. Say, just back up for a moment. Look at it like you were a God looking down at people. And you see a person who believes that the president went in public and recommended drinking Clorox and Lysol. Does that seem likely, even if you believe that this president says things that you don't agree with that maybe are not scientifically appropriate? Do you think this president recommended that in public? Do you really need to go to look at the transcript? Somebody says he said it in jest. He didn't say it in jest. And for those of you who believe him when he said he was being sarcastic, you really have to look in the mirror on that one. Because if you can see sarcasm there, I don't see it. All I saw was he was right. He just doesn't want to go through the bother of explaining why he was right, because he was completely right. He actually knew more than the news people, and he may have known a little bit more than Dr. Birx about this one UV light thing, because it was just based on some articles. She may not have seen them. So I think the better explanation is he knew exactly what he was talking about, but he said it unclearly. That part is objectively true. Anyway, have you heard of the uncanny valley? I think you have if you've watched my periscopes, I remind you what that is. So the uncanny valley is the idea. And you can look it up on Wikipedia. Just Google uncanny valley. And it's the idea that we humans can find something cute if it doesn't look like a human at all. So my cat Boo is on the rug over there, and she's very cute. And it's because she doesn't look anything like a human. So my brain allows me to see her as cute. Likewise, if I had a robot that looked like a proper robot, didn't look like a human, I might think my robot was kind of cute. But where you get in Trouble, the uncanny valley is that when you get closer and closer to something that's human but not quite there, such as a zombie. A zombie is almost like a human, but there's something wrong. And it's that little something wrong, that slight change which causes us revulsion. So when you see a monster movie with the undead, or somebody's got a human like form, but they're not human, you go, ah, that's terrible, because they're almost human, but they're not. That's the worst thing. I like it when they're human. I like it when they're a robot. But don't give me that almost human thing. That's going to freak me out. And so I speculate that I'm having that experience watching people who believe the fake news arguing with people on Twitter, and even watching them live interviews actually looking like they believe that the President recommended drinking Clorox and Lysol. I can't see them as human. Are you having the same problem? Now, obviously they are human. They have human DNA and all that. But in the context of having this discussion, they take on an almost unnatural. I don't know, it's like they're possessed because they don't make any sense. I just had an argument with somebody who insisted he could read the President's mind and that his interpretation of what the President meant is based on this guy knowing what he was thinking and he actually, in public, he was willing to tell me that he knows what a stranger is thinking. When it's obvious that it was the opposite of that. It's pretty obvious. So they register as zombies to me. And I'm not saying that as an insult. I'm saying that as just a description that when I'm talking to somebody who can't deal with even the most obvious truth, that the President never recommended drinking Clorox. You don't even have to look at the transcript to know that didn't happen. But if you do look at the transcript, you can tell it didn't happen. But you don't need to. It's just so obviously didn't happen. Now, I saw this with the Russia collusion stuff. I saw this with the fine people hoax. The people who actually believe this stuff just don't register at the moment that they're not believing it at that moment. They don't register as fully functioning people. Now, to be fair, I have to assume that Democrats think exactly the same thing about Republicans and conservatives. It just depends on the context. It depends who's believing the fake news. On any given moment, because it's not like the fake news is only believed by one side, obviously. But there is a big difference that's been demonstrated by studies that says that the conservatives, at least, are aware of both arguments. The conservatives know what their argument is, and they also know what the other side is, whereas the left typically doesn't even have any exposure to the opposite argument. So by the time that they get into the debate with me, they've never even seen the other side. And so it's the first time they're hearing it, and their brain can't process that. They could have been so wrong for so long and so positive at the same time. And then I dismantle them in about 10 seconds, and cognitive dissonance sinks in, and they flip into zombie mode. And the zombie mode is like, I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes. It's right there. And you say, where is it? Here's the transcript. Can you point to the place in the transcript where he literally said to drink Clorox or even something you could interpret that way? Can you show me where he said that? And of course, it isn't there. Okay. I'm seeing people agree that it is an uncanny valley kind of thing. Now, there was a time early on with this hoax, the disinfectant hoax. There was a time when I thought, oh, they're just playing with this. They don't really believe it. You know, they don't believe it. They're just saying it because people say things in a political season. But it definitely seems to me when you see Anderson Cooper and you see some of the other people talking about looks like they actually believe it. He said inject, correct, and inject. Are you correcting. I think you're correcting me because I said insert. That might be what you're correcting in the comments. Yes. I believe he said inject, which is also a descriptive word for putting something down all the way into your lungs. You're injecting it into a body. So that's not the right medical word. But it should be obvious in context what he meant. How much will you pay? I don't know what that means. CNN will change reality. I said ingest is what the CNN is saying in their headlines. So I've used ingest for what CNN says. But what the president said was inject, which is an accurate word. Yeah. Somebody saying, when I saw it live, I thought he wanted to inject light. That's what I thought. Now, he also asked more generally about cleaning out the lungs and it turns out that there are a number of gas like treatments where they inject gas into your lungs and the gas is like a disinfectant in other contexts. So disinfectant, of course, is the problem word, because a vaccine, not a vaccine, but let's say a therapeutic that you do ingest is a disinfectant. So I will solve your problem. Boom. Problem solved. Please, next topic. I'm just doing a little blocking here. Excuse me. Anybody else need a block? I think we're good for now. All right, so that's basically all I had for today. And yeah, he was brainstorming, but he was brainstorming about real things that really exist. And the Democrats will pretend they don't. The Brits call the coronavirus Miley Cyrus. What? I thought I saw Miley Cyrus in the news. I didn't know what that was about. Bergey for hire says. Ha ha. Wow. Trumpets will do and say anything to cover for their orange daddy. So let me ask you, Bergey for hire, did you believe that the President of the United States was suggesting drinking Clorox? Are you proud of that? Are you proud of the fact that you believe your news? You shouldn't admit that in public. So I'll give you a block so you don't have to worry about it anymore. Did I already talk about tracing apps? I talked about a little bit last night, but let me say more about that. I guess Australia has a tracing app. It's voluntary and it will tell you who you've come in contact with in terms of other people who have also volunteered to use the app. Or is it only the volunteers? I'm not sure if it's only those volunteers, but anyway, then Apple and Google have some kind of thing where they can tell who you've contacted based on where your phone has been. I think that might be our only solution. To me, it seems that the simulation has served up the following test and it goes like this. Our belief is that we are a species who needs privacy and that privacy is just a plus. It's always a plus. More privacy is better, and we all have that same feeling. I have it, you have it. It's just natural. I don't know if we're raised that way or it's just automatic, but we all want privacy. However, this video game of life has presented us with the following challenge. Apparently we can't say this for sure, but apparently all of our other solutions are going to be ineffective. It looks like people don't build immunity. Maybe we don't Know that for sure. It looks like our therapeutics might help, but probably are not going to be a magic bullet. It looks like we'll have to wait too long to get to a vaccine. It seems to me that the one and only solution that could work is aggressive lack of privacy. In other words, just saying, all right, the only way we're going to deal with this without losing millions of people. It's the only way. We tried every other path. The therapeutics work a little, but they don't solve it. The vaccines don't get us there. There's no herd immunity. We can't socially distance forever. The one and only thing that will work can only work if people give up more privacy, then they would like to give up. So that's your challenge. And I would argue that this is maybe an awareness challenge. Oh, you don't like that? You don't like that this might be an awareness problem. And I believe that we cannot go to the next level in this video game simulation until we understand that privacy and our need for it is more illusion than an actual need. And I say that because I think we humans, we've evolved to not have that much privacy, meaning that by our nature, we're tribal. And if you're in a tribe and you don't even have doors and windows, there's not much privacy. So I don't think we're a species who evolved over millions of years to need privacy in the way we think we need it. It's a preference. So we have a preference for it that's very strong. We have a fear of losing it because we fear that that will give problems. And I think that that is an illusion. And so we might actually destroy civilization on Earth if we can't see past it. If you can't see past the illusion. Now, the other possibility is you just open up and take the hit. So that's a path. You just say, well, it might be half a million Americans die, but we're not going to close down the country. That's just what it's going to be. And I would guess, I don't know, it's sort of a 50, 50 at this point whether whether we'll take the hit or we'll give up some privacy to avoid the hit. I don't know. You would need to make carrying a phone mandatory. No, that is not correct. The beauty of the contact tracing is that it can be very imprecise and still good enough. You could do a terrible job at contact tracing. But let's say if you Got half of it, you would be cutting in half the virality of the thing, and that might be enough. If you cut it in half, it might be enough to kill it. So when you say, well, people might turn off their phones, some people, you know, might want, not want to participate, blah, blah, blah, that's all true. But the estimate that the Australian app makers made was that if 40% of the public used it voluntarily, just 40%, that would be enough to catch so much of it that you get the virality level below 1, which means that one person now gives it to fewer than one person, which means that it eventually disappears. So even at 40%, it looks like it worked. So I really think this feels like a challenge to humanity to see if we can give up privacy in some intelligent way. Now, when I say give up privacy, I don't mean the stuff you do in your bedroom. Nobody cares about that. I don't mean your bathroom. Nobody cares about that. I'm talking about where you spend your money and where you go. I've argued for decades that the only privacy that's real, lack of interest, the only privacy that's real is when people don't care. And the reason that celebrities have so little privacy relative to the regular public is that people care. The reason I have less privacy than you do is because I'm a public figure. So people are willing to violate my privacy. Not that I mind, because if you're a public figure, that's part of the deal. So that's what I think now, and I acknowledge that the vast majority of you violently disagree with what I just said and that you're not going to give up privacy even at the cost of half a million deaths in this country. I don't think that's a wrong decision if you ask me, Scott, do you recommend that we give up our privacy? I would say I can't recommend that for you. It's sort of a personal decision. Everybody has their own need for obsession with privacy. Some people need a lot. Some people need a little sort of a psychological phenomenon. And somebody said, you first. I already went first. Can I see you? No. Somebody says, you first. Pinesol just said that. Pine Sol followed by a number. You don't have your picture in the profile, but you're looking at me. You don't have your real name in the profile, but you know my real name. I can't Google you and find out where you live, but you could Google me and find out where I live. You can look at my whole life on Wikipedia. Half of it's wrong, but you can look at it. You can look at all the fake news about me everywhere. A lot of it's wrong, of course, but I've already given up my privacy, so I know what I'm talking about. If I said to you, hey, you regular people, would you be willing to give up as much privacy as I have already? How many of you would say yes to that? How many of you would take the deal of giving up only as much privacy as I give up every day just by being a public figure? How many would you say yes to that? A few. But most of you would be quite uncomfortable with it, right? I just happened not to be. So it's just a very personal thing. Freedom is the issue, not privacy. Well, I take that correction. So somebody says the real issue is freedom, not privacy. So I accept that upgrade, but I don't think it changes the argument in the least. It just sort of substitutes a little bit of extra meaning. But let's say you call it freedom. It's the same question. Are you willing to give up that specific kind of freedom? It's not all freedom, you know, you can still say and do things you want. It's just a very specific kind. So if you want to call it freedom instead of privacy, I'll accept that. But it's not freedom in general. It's just that specific kind of freedom. Do you ever go back and read all the comments after I actually do, yeah. Frequently I go back just to read the comments. If I was talking about something and I don't know how it went over, I'll go read the comments to see how people reacted, which is a really good idea. Somebody says, your life and your choices don't apply to my life and my choices. Correct? Correct. So if there's somebody here who says, screw you, Scott, you don't get to talk for me, I get to make my own choices. I say, that's true. There's no argument there. I don't have any control over your choices. None at all. And I don't want it. I'm just saying that if you want the current situation, you know how to get it. And if you want a different situation, well, there's a path. There's a path there, too. If you don't want to take it, I can't push you. I certainly wouldn't try to make you make that choice. I'm actually with you. To me, freedom is sufficiently important that if you said to me, scott, here are your two choices. You give away the people have to Give away their freedom, you could call it, but it's really privacy part of freedom. Or half a million people die. Might not be you, might not be one of your family members, but half a million people are going to die earlier than they needed to be. Most of them are elderly. Will you take that deal? I would say maybe that's not unreasonable, given the number of people who have died for freedom. If you told me, well, we're going to queue up another half a million of them because every now and then you got to buy your freedom again. So that's the price Coronavirus just gave us the invoice and the invoice says, if you'd like some freedom or if you'd like to keep some freedom you thought you had, here's your invoice. It's somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 dead. Might not be you, might not be your family. Could be, could be you, could be your family. But here's your invoice. Are you willing to pay this to get that bit of privacy freedom? I think a reasonable person would pay that bill. Am I wrong? Would a reasonable person pay that bill? I say yes. I think there's plenty of room for people to have different priorities. Because this isn't so much a logic question. A lot of questions are just, are you rational? Sometimes there's a rational opinion and there's a bad shit, crazy opinion, but this isn't one of those situations. This is purely a priority question. Mostly. Mostly a priority question. Is your priority, is it a priority you'd be willing to die for or risk death? You wouldn't be willing to die for it, but you might be willing to risk death, and you're willing to risk half a million deaths in the country because your priority is this bit of freedom. Reasonable. It's reasonable. I'm not sure I would agree with it, but I wouldn't tell you you were being crazy. You know, the people who say there's almost no, there's no price too big for freedom, you know, if you'd said, you know, look, Scott, it's going to cost us 5 million people. 5 million people, and some of them might be your family, but it's the only way we can buy it, buy our freedom back. I would say again, even at 5 million people, I'd say I might take the other way. You know, I'll look at my options, but I'm not going to criticize you if you said freedom is worth 5 million people and some of them might be your family. If you're willing to say that directly, I'll say, well, you're a person who's thought this through. You've looked at the costs, you've looked at the benefits. You've got a philosophy. You've got some history on your side. Yeah, I would accept that as a credible opinion. All right. Somebody says, I'll take the gamble and keep my freedom. Well, let me ask you this, for the person who just said this, I'm going to accept that you get to set your own priorities, and I will not tell you that you should change them. So I'm not going to try to change your mind. I'm just curious, what kind of freedom has that kind of value to you? Because I can't think of any in my own life. And like I said, I've experienced a lack of freedom for decades relative to what other people had. And I would have assumed it would be bad, but I don't experience it that way. I don't know if I just got used to it or my personality is such that it doesn't bother me. I don't know. But ask yourself what specifically you would be afraid of somebody knowing. Now, most of the times when I ask this kind of question, it turns into a chain of events. It's a slippery slope argument in disguise. So the real argument is not, well, I don't really care if there's some encrypted database about where my phone has been when I had it on. So I think you'd find people who say, okay, I don't really care about that, you know, because that could be temporary. It's useful. I'm not going anywhere that's, you know, I'm not going anywhere to do any drug deals. I don't have a mistress. So, yeah, I don't care. But I do care if this becomes the first stage of doing it permanently, because then, you know, it's a slippery slope to losing all of my rights. I always reject the slippery slope argument. And. So Dave Rubin's just texting me, we're going to talk soon. Dave Rubin has a new book out, and I'd like to talk to him about his new book. So we'll do that probably Tuesday. I'm not sure. All right. I think Tuesday his book comes out. That doesn't mean I'll be talking to him on Tuesday. So I'll set that up and we'll talk about this. But ask yourself. Ask yourself which privacy in particular you really care about. You might find that when you dig down, there's just nothing there. Because again, nobody's giving up your bathroom or your bedroom privacy. Nobody's talking about giving up your. Your health care records. It's not that kind of thing. All right. Your financial info, you know, did you hear Greg Guffel talk about. Is it Norway? I might have the details wrong. I think it's Norway that publishes everybody's tax records in a public place. Have you heard about that? They just post it. It's just online. You could go look at your neighbor's tax returns in Norway. Now, what's your first reaction to that? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm not going to live in a world where my neighbors or anybody wants can see my tax returns. But has Norway disappeared? Has Norway sunk into the ocean? If you ask the typical Norwegian, hey, what's your biggest problem today? Do you think they're going to say, you know, everything's pretty good, but my taxes are online and my neighbor can see them? And somebody says Naval is right about the slippery slope? People try to use Naval as their argument substitute. Like, if Naval said it, I should automatically agree. But in almost every case, somebody is misunderstanding Naval's opinion. No, Naval does not say there's such a thing as a slippery slope. I haven't even heard his opinion, and I know that that's not true. So don't tell me that Naval believes there is such a thing as a slippery slope. There is such a thing as things changing over time. Sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Sometimes they change in a way that some people say is better and some people say is worse. But there's no rule of physics that is the slippery slope. There's no automatic reason that things go in the same direction. And there's no way that Naval believes that. I'm not reading his mind. I'm just saying he's way too smart to say that the slippery slope is a thing. It's just that some things go in a direction and some things don't. I mean, that's all it is. All right? But in Norway, none of the Norwegians seem to have a problem, having given up one of the most basic pieces of privacy that you've ever heard of in your life. I'm not recommending we do that because I personally have a high priority in keeping people from looking at my tax returns because my income is in that category where I don't want people looking at it. Maybe if I had a more ordinary job, I would say, I don't care. Who cares? I'm an accountant. Somebody looks at my numbers, I Don't care. I'm a doctor. Who cares if somebody knows I make a lot of money because I'm a doctor, Nobody cares. But I'm in a weird situation where people actually do. Look up my net worth on Forbes. Like the number of people who have Googled my net worth is kind of crazy. It's always wrong. By the way, you can Google it. It's just ridiculous guesses. I've talked about the Crenshaw interview a bunch, so I won't be talking about that again, probably. Scott, you're wrong about this. There is a video. A video of what? There's a video of what? If you're saying that there's a video of Naval believing in magic, I'm going to say I don't have to research that. I don't. The slippery slope is basically magical. Thinking that there's something that causes things to magically move in a direction absent cause and effect, that affects everything else in the world. That's just not a thing. Things move forward if there's no reason to stop them, and they stop when there's a reason to stop them. That's it. That's all you need to know. Scott, it's not like you say in Norway, you are wrong. I don't know what that means. It's called hysteresis, not slippery slope. Now, I will admit that if you get used to something, it's more likely that you could move to the next level once you got used to the first thing. That's real. But it's also what progress looks like. Somebody says, Jim Davis makes way more than you do. Yeah, Jim Davis. I don't know about this year, but he makes it way more than most people. Great way of making friends at work. Yeah, but in theory, the lack of privacy. Imagine this. What would a lack of privacy about your tax returns do for income inequality? At the very least, the male, female, difference in payment should be obvious, right? Stop telling me that there's a video of Naval believing in magic, because I'm not going to go look for it. It doesn't exist. It's not a thing. But I'm not going to look into that. Sorry. No. Nobody believes in magic. I'm sorry. You can say you saw it. You could say you saw it with your own eyes. You can say you heard it with your own ears. You could even point me to the URL. It's not there. It doesn't exist. You might think you heard it, but it's not there. All right. Have you seen Minority Report? I have? Yes. Would you agree there is the thin end of the wedge? I don't know what that means. Germany and Nazism was a slippery slope? Nope. It's just something that happened. Slippery slope implies there's some, like, physics or there's a law that made it go in the way. Again. No, there was just people who made decisions and it went that way. And people make other decisions and it doesn't go that way. If the slippery slope existed, there would be all kinds of Nazi Germanys. Nazi Germany would be the norm. If there was a slippery slope that got you to there. There are points of friction. Somebody says the slippery slope is when you break a point of friction. Do you know why there would be no friction? Because people agree it's a good idea. You can't call the slippery slope when people think it's a good idea. That's not the slippery slope. All right, that's enough for now. I will talk to you all tonight. You know when to find me. See you then.