Episode 1553 Scott Adams - All of Our Problems Have Been Solved Except For Celebrities Killing People

good morning everybody and welcome to the best thing that ever happened to you and maybe anybody else it's called coffee with scott adams and there's a little thing called the simultaneous set that's coming up in a moment but i have to set the stage have i ever told you how much i hate sleeping i'm the only person i know i'm sure there are others but i hate sleeping and so i wake up just naturally quite early i start work four four a.m usually it'd be my ideal time to start work so last night i woke up in bed and i thought to myself you know i i think i'm just going to get up because i was awake and i didn't really check the clock because my internal clock's pretty accurate i thought that's pretty close to 4 am give or take so i got up it turned out to be 1 45 1 45 is when i woke up this morning and i was already up and around and patting the dog and i thought you two vet vegas so let's just say that the quality of this live stream might be a little bit lower than what you used to i'm just trying to set the expectations but still despite all of that how terrific is it going to be to do the simultaneous simple it's going to be amazing you know you use a cupra mug or a glass of tiger jealous it's not a canteen junk a flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day thing makes everything better especially your antibodies it's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now go um i don't know about you but sometimes if you're leaning when you have the simultaneous step it'll it'll stimulate the antibodies only on the lower side of your body so if you did if you made the mistake i did which was leaning while you did it try try this lean the other way there we go there we go antibodies stimulated and evenly distributed now we're in good shape all right uh question for all of you i was just chatting with the local subscribers before i fired up youtube and asked i'm going to ask you the same question on youtube is body language real in other words is it a skill which you can learn and apply or maybe you've already learned it and and then you apply it is body language real go yes yes yes yes yes absolutely yes yes yes yes yes yes okay looks like we have universal agreement that body language is real question number two how do you know you're good at reading it yeah you're not so certain now are you here's my observation it doesn't matter if body language is real or not for most purposes it doesn't matter because you don't know if you're good at reading it that's the problem the problem is not whether body language is real the problem is you think you can read it and you can't you're terrible at it uh it's the same problem with pattern recognition right our brains are pattern recognition machines and we see patterns and we think they mean something even when they don't that's why we have science to to essentially get around our own illusions about patterns well don't you think that your pattern recognition is what's driving your interpretation of body language all right so now you all think that body language is is a real thing and you got real quiet here's my next question you ready to have your brain blown off you ready you ready how many of you listening or watching right now have been accused of feeling something you did not feel because somebody you know misread your body language how many this week this week i'll read your uh messages all the time most of the time me me me yep often yup yup yup yes true true true yes true every now read here every day a few knows every day every day yes yes yes every day all right now now you see where i'm going here if body language reading were a real thing don't you think they'd read your your body language right don't you think that the people who accuse you of being let's say angry when you weren't angry or not interested when you were interested whatever it was they were they were blaming uf don't you think that the person who did that thought that they were good at reading body language wouldn't you say probably every person who falsely accused you because they read your body language wrong i'll bet every one of them thought they did it well right it's sort of like do your own research how many of you think that it's uh wise and notable to do your own research there's a big story most of you seen it about quarterback aaron rodgers who is getting a lot of attention because he was fairly eloquent in describing his process of deciding whether to get vaccinated or not he decided apparently not to he he thought there were some risks of allergic reactions in his case that might be unique to him i don't know if that's a thing do you is that a thing did i don't know i mean i looked it up but i couldn't find that it's a thing but he thinks it's a thing now if i asked you should you do your own research and talk to your doctor to decide what to do most of you would say what should you do your own research on let's say anything but vaccinations and then talk to your doctor that's the way you should handle it right do your own research and talk to your doctor how many of you think you should only do one of those only your own research or only talk to your own doctor nobody right you would all agree 100 that you should do your own research and then talk to your doctor you know doctors are saying different things right they're not all they're all saying the same thing so how do you know you got the right doctor you're basically imagining that you were good at picking a doctor you probably didn't pick your doctor most of you just sort of took the doctor that was there because you don't know how to pick a good doctor from a bad doctor so and similar to uh getting a financial advisor there are more financial advisors than there are stocks how do you know you got a good financial advisor they don't they don't beat the market more than a monkey with a dartboard they usually do worse than a monkey with a dartboard let's say compared to index funds so here's the problem that we run into all the time body language is totally real but you can't do it you just think you can financial analysis in which you look at the pros and cons of companies and study their balance sheets and look at their business model and study the management quality that's very real you can't do it but you think you can you think he can likewise doing your own research to decide what you should do about vaccinations you think you can do that but you can't you can't likewise almost everything that you see on twitter that's a graph or a chart or is proving something you think you can read that and come to a decision that's pretty good but you can't you don't have those skills nobody does basically nobody does you know i the reason that i continually promote people like andres backhouse and anatoly lebarsky is that they seem to be very close to having those skills but of course nobody's right all the time right so when you don't know how bad you are of something until you see somebody who's good at it would you agree with that would you agree that generally speaking it's impossible to know how bad you are or something until you meet somebody who's good at it take singing for example i suppose you had never met a good singer you probably thought you could do it and then you meet mariah carey and you say oh okay i don't know what i was doing but that wasn't singing that singing whatever i was doing i don't even know what that was anymore right so the problem is you'll never meet somebody who's good at body language because there aren't many of them i don't know if there are any of them really but i'm assuming that the people who study it you know professionally probably are pretty good at it pretty good but you're never going to meet them right and it's not you so you should all i would encourage you to do is have some humility about the assumption that you can do your own research now let me give you my macro opinion of aaron rodgers bunch of people sent me his video and said hey this is really persuasive this guy gets it and here's where he lost me he lost me when he called himself a critical thinker so far so good right called himself a critical thinker and then he demonstrated it by saying that he did his own research that's where he lost me because if you're a critical thinker you know you can't if he were a critical thinker he would know that he can't do his own research not in any reliable way i mean even if he were a top researcher he probably couldn't let me give you another example the director of the cdc i guess recently claimed that face masks are 80 percent effective really really is there anybody who believes that face masks are 80 effective 80 percent even the people who are in favor of them are are giving numbers that are like sub 20 and we're not even entirely sure about that right so uh of course uh this caused somebody in the comments to that there was a tweet about it and as soon as i saw it i thought that must be a typo didn't you think that if you saw that the the head the director of the cdc the director if you if you read something that said she thought mass were 80 effective wouldn't you think that was a typo or just didn't really happen but apparently it did it did and apparently and i didn't know this there are a whole bunch of studies that show that maths are 70 to 80 percent effective in certain situations that are basically not this one how long did it take for somebody to reply to the tweet that showed a whole bunch of studies that show masks totally work how long did it take somebody to paste a whole bunch of studies the show masks totally don't work about a second so right next to each other on twitter is a link to an article that mentions a whole bunch of studies masks totally work and then another one a whole bunch of studies masks totally don't work so when aaron rodgers goes to do his own research how does he sort that out now he was talking about vaccinations not masks but it's a perfect example do you think aaron rodgers with whatever skill stack he brings to this could be a critical thinker and then sort out whether mass work or not with two completely different sets of answers i can't could you how many of you could do that right so he did his own research but it's absurd because he never knows what he doesn't know right if you're outside of a if you're from the outside of the area of expertise unless you're unusually smart you know unless you're uh you know elon musk smart you can't enter somebody else's field and and like figure it out that's not a thing you know it's it's a thing for the the smartest among us but it's not a thing generally speaking and certainly another thing that aaron rodgers did so when he calls himself a critical thinker i challenge that because a critical thinker would know that you can't do what he claims to have done it's not doable with the brains we have and the information that's available to us it's just not doable in any rational way all right let's talk about this i am so interested in the steele dossier story update because something's happening right and i don't know exactly what it is because the some parts of the media are treating it like it's not even a story but it looks like it's the biggest story and so we have these two movies running at the same time that is the biggest thing i've seen in years or it's nothing or you know just some weasels did some lying that's about it so it's either some weasels did some lying or hillary clinton was behind or her campaign was behind a legitimate plan to overthrow the basically to cheat in the major election and or overthrow a sitting president once trump was elected it's either what is it is it the worst thing in the world or is it nothing do your own research go go look at the media do you think you can figure it out if it's nothing or it's a whole bunch well i think this story is telling you how deeply the intelligence assets in this country are embedded in the media that's all this is telling us right you know as glenn greenwald often tweets and writes that the public isn't fully aware that major parts of our media are just controlled by the cia or cia assets or some damn intelligence you know units of the government and this isn't this isn't conspiracy theory stuff this is really well documented stuff i don't know if anybody even i don't think there's anybody serious who even doubts it right that our intelligence agencies directly influence the news and so when you see that this story is sort of semi-disappeared there it's definitely covered and the opinion people are talking about it but it should be the main story i think and yet sort of downplayed everywhere now actually that's an exaggeration the washington post covered it so give them that jonathan jonathan swan i think he's axios uh tweeted that the tweet of the washington post coverage so i looked on axios to see the coverage and there wasn't anything today but i'm sure they covered it originally and so jonathan swann summarizes the washington post coverage of it this way he says the charges are not only did clinton slash democrats fund the dossier but a long time clinton dem operative was one of the sources for the rumors about trump and then he summarizes that by saying doesn't get much worse right right as in this the biggest story it doesn't get much worse but it's not the biggest story do you see now that the uh do you see now that um there's somebody deciding what a story is you get that right there's somebody and it probably varies depending on what the story is but somebody controls whether or not the world thinks it matters and amazingly whoever that is or those people or entities or a series of forces whatever it is has decided that this won't get attention it's really freaky isn't it when you see it in real time when you see that the news is just not even close to real it's just it's just a brainwashing operation you can't see who's pulling the strings all the time but sometimes you can see the strings this is one of those times when you can see the strings you're like hey hey hey i can actually see those strings and it won't matter what are you going to do about it so let's say you and i see this the how bad this story is what are you going to do about it no that's right what am i going to do about it i can't think of anything i can do about it wait i don't know so it's a weird story it's the biggest story ever treat it like it's nothing to be even more amazed turns out that rachel maddow is running a report that durham you know the very same person who's coming out with this new information and barr ex ag bar intentionally ignored emails that quote prove trump was in direct communications with the russian alpha bank a covert community communication channel existed during the 2016 campaign that bar and durham knew was real but they covered up boomerang says rachel maddow gotcha so are any of the other major media covering that story where's that story on cnn i didn't see it where's that story on fox news i don't know i didn't see it did she just make this up this is just totally made up and don't you think there's a little context missing so she claims that there are emails that durham and barr saw but ignored what what is the missing context they saw it and they ignored it the missing context is why did they ignore it probably because it was bs or unimportant or some trivial email probably there's nothing here and rachel maddow has decided to turn it into something who controls msnbc depends who you ask some would say intelligence agencies i can't confirm that but that's a that's a common claim if you're an intelligence agency wouldn't you want to create the counter narrative that oh no it really was trump who is colluding with russia after all this is so heavy-handed this is like really obvious heavy-handed manipulation of the public it's kind of crazy and here's the thing it's totally working no matter how easily you can see the the puppet strings and say hey hey this is clearly manipulation and a trick it still works because again what the hell are you going to do about it take your story to the media hey i see what's going on here i think i'll i'll call my contacts at cnn and report it seriously what the hell are you going to do about it as long as the media is going to cover it the way they're covering it that's sort of the end of it there's nothing you can do what are you going to do call tim poole if he if he doesn't uh if he recovers from his uh covet i mean the independents are so small relative to the major media that there's nothing you can do all right that story just fascinates the whole enemy that you can make something like that disappear so pfizer announced that they've got a covenant pill that at least in the test they had zero deaths from people who took the coven pill soon after having symptoms and uh reduces deaths 89 or something like that now if you've got a pill and i imagine this will get approved pretty quickly that reduces it by 89 aren't you done like isn't this pill the the get back to work bill because if you've got the vaccinations themselves and of course not everyone will take them but they reduce the risk you know by some enormous amount then you've got this pill and that reduces it by an enormous amount you've got the monoclonal antibodies we know that works we know the vitamin d drip works um at least a few other things we know work so each of these has like takes a big percentage out of the total risk where the once the pfizer pill is here and one's like it you know the um who was it uh uh i forget the other company that has a pill but i feel like we're done when we have those don't you i mean i've i felt like this before so maybe this is false optimism but how how much better would it be if you've got these pills that work so long as you you take them early how much better would things be if we had rapid tests that you that are so cheap you could just do one every day suppose you could for one dollar test yourself every day and you know not everybody would spend 365 dollars per person in their household but a lot of people would a lot of people would and you would get at least the the super spreaders but if you were catching a fast and taking the pill fast i feel like we're done right i mean i don't know when we'll all have availability of these pills and then the real question is do you just buy these pills and keep them around all right you know i'm sure they're prescription but wouldn't it be great if you could just get some and keep them because you don't want to have that time lag between a dry cough and getting the prescription because that you know that could be eight hours right by the time you yeah if you wake up in the middle of night with a dry cough it could be hours and hours so wouldn't you like to test yourself grab a pill you're done you've already treated yourself go back to bed alone in quarantine all right so apparently there was a claim that the uh the uk version of the drug that got approved um was really just ivermectin now oh i'm sorry there was some thought that maybe the pfizer one or somebody else's anyway the claim is false and the claim was that one of these companies was just repurposing ivormectin and here's a little tip for you you can always assume that fraud is hiding in any complicated environment a complicated environment would be finance definitely fraud there science definitely fraud there and we hear about it all the time it's obvious right and so the more confusing it is the more likely is fraud but when you heard the first time you heard this rumor that one of these big companies was just going to try to slip ivermectin into a different name of a pill that you should have known that wasn't a thing because it would be too easy to catch them right how hard would it be for somebody to just you know somebody who knows how to do it to take a look at it and say uh this is just ivermectin you guys have been screwing us it would be so easy to find it out it would be ridiculous for them to try that uh zunar says wrong what are you going to do well what you're going to do is start taking ivermectin that's what you're going to do if and again the rumor is false so so there's no uh persuasive evidence that ivory mechton works as far as i know but i also wouldn't know um all right good comment though sooner so i would just say that the only reason anybody would believe this ivermectin rumor that is really the the drug that's in these other pills rebranded is because we'll believe anything now like nothing seems off the table does it when you hear this story about the steele dossier the the real way it was created doesn't it almost feel to you as if there's just nothing that's off the table anymore just anything's possible am i right so you can make up any rumor and somebody's going to believe it because people say well that's not any worse than the five things i heard on the news that might be true yeah we've lost all trust that that is true um how would you like me to fix the supply chain problem you ready now remember i'm never totally serious when i say stuff like that but i think it's fun to talk about it i'll give you a little background i tweeted and talked to you the other day and i said that one of the secrets of persuasion is that whoever makes the best visual graph of whatever the problem or solution is whoever does the best job of the visualization part ends up being in charge because the visualization tells people what to do for the first time because if it's a complicated situation people can't read through it and decide what they want to do but if you give them a nice clean chart or pie chart or visualization and it's accurate people suddenly will line up behind it say oh okay now we know what to do we know what the problem is etcetera so the the power of being good at creating visualizations is way underrated because i used to do that you know for my corporate jobs and i discovered that basically i was running the department because i could make the visualization compelling or not for whatever i wanted and it felt like the chart making person was running stuff it certainly felt like that when i was making the charts because because i could make them good or bad if i wanted so hearing my explanation of the power of charts ryan peterson ceo of flexport who you already know because he did a terrific thread in which he went to actually visited the ports he's a you know he works in this industry so he knows what questions they ask and where to look for problems and he came up with a pretty good analysis a very good analysis actually so good that the governor of california called him to see what was going on see if he could help so it was that good and uh and then he followed up with building a presentation that's really good really good so you can see it on my twitter feed or just look for ryan peterson the send part on the end is sen petersen ceo of flexport and you can see his stuff there and i recommend it because i think it's really fun actually weirdly because i'm a total nerd about business models does anybody else have that yeah i went to business school and so i just got hooked on business models like what what is it that makes some company have a process that makes money and it's different some others yeah i see some other people saying the same thing that business models are just endlessly fascinating to me so anyway seeing seeing this flowchart of what the problem is and i'll let me quickly summarize the problem you think the problem was truck drivers right how many of you have been told the problem is not enough truck drivers well that is a problem-ish but it's not the immediate problem it's not the reason stuff is backed up because there are drivers sitting in trucks with an empty container on the back and they don't have any place to put the empty so you have you have drivers all over the place with just an empty on the back and no place to put it so they can't pick up a new one so they can't do any work because they can't get rid of the one that's on the back now why can't they get rid of the one in the back well the ports got slammed with the the pandemic traffic because people bought more goods than they consumed services so people's spending patterns radically changed and they started buying stuff because they were stuck at home instead of going on a vacation and buying gas and stuff so that momentary shock of the system caused a build up that rippled and the ripple was that they didn't have a place to put the empty containers and then that slows everything down because they're in the way now part of the solution was uh getting approval to stack some of the containers in places that they couldn't stack them or in ways that they couldn't stack them before and i think that ryan peterson was instrumental in getting that happening quickly so it made a little bit of a difference it's not the solution but the big problem is that there are you need a special kind of chassis in other words the the part that's behind the the big rig truck it has to be a special kind for a empty ca or any kind of container to be uh carried on and there aren't enough of those to carry the new traffic because they're all used up with an empty on it they can't go anywhere now you say to yourself scott this is the easiest problem in the world to solve just take all those trucks with the empties the government just say okay temporarily here's a farmer's field it's an emergency farmer says it's okay we'll give them some money just drive to this empty field and just put all your empty containers there right how do you get them off the truck how do you get the container off the truck you need that crane that's back at the port you can't get them off the truck except at the port and do you know why you can't get them off the truck at the port because it's already filled with empty containers so the cranes the cranes and the trucks can't get near each other even the cranes are not being used because there's nothing but uh trucks with empties and empties all over the place and that's your problem oh you're you're ahead of me so here's my question all right suppose you took the best engineers in the world and you put them in the metaverse so they could have a meeting in in the zuckerberg's virtual world so it feels like they're there and you take you know your elon musk's i like to use them for every example he just fits every example it seems like you take your elon musk you take your you know best engineers from a few different places and you just put them in one place you say here's the problem the normal way that empties are taken off is with the same crane i think fact-check me on this the same crane that they use at the ports to do everything else that the cranes do so the cranes as they're built are sort of multi-purpose for the ports but suppose you wanted to very quickly develop a an engineering solution that would simply take an empty off the first thing the first advantage is that you're only dealing with empties so if you were to build a crane or or a forklift type device whatever it would take you wouldn't have to make it very strong compared to the ones at the port because the port has to take full containers as well as empties so that has to be way way way stronger but if you're only dealing with the empties and it's an emergency you just want to get empties off chassis could you modify a forklift could you build one of those magnet things that just picks it off as long as you've disconnected it somehow from the chassis could you do it with a giant magnet how long would it take a caterpillar for example to modify anything that they have existing they can very quickly just grab empties and and toss them off right so suppose you did a you know it's an overused concept but basically a manhattan project to find a temporary engineering solution for removing empties from chassis not at the port so you know is there such a thing is there anybody who knows is there such a thing as that like just a badass forklift that's big enough to take an entire empty container off a truck is there such a thing and could you modify some other piece of equipment or equipments that could do that oh there it is there's somebody gave me the actual picture of a forklift that's meant for exactly that so how hard would it be to get a few forklifts in some big farmer fields so i'm saying yes they already exist so i so you don't really need to move the crane anywhere do you maybe just these forklifts yeah so i guess there's there's more questions right remember i told you uh every time you think you can do your own research you just find out that that's not something you can do so here's a perfect example so here i am trying to do my own research but you know it's not my full-time job just like it isn't most people's full-time job to research anything and i don't know what's going on still because if there exists and i can see that they do exist these giant forklifts probably they're all being used at the ports themselves but it seems like maybe for a day or two you could at least get a few of them and just outsource them to the farmer's field or wherever uh yeah redesigned the trucks to be self-emptying so i just tweeted there is such a device so there are trucks that are self-unloading so it looks like they've got some kind of a roller thing so they just dip it down and let the then they drive away slowly and that and the container just but i don't think they make those for too many chassis um forklifts can't run on soft ground good point good point so you need some kind of paved situation that's a really good point but they could if it's packed down they could if it's packed down dirt they could probably maybe not too heavy all right um you did you hear about travis scott he has this festival called the astro world in houston and apparently the crowd uh surged it's not clear why and eight people died and hundreds were injured and stuff and is it my imagination or is the fourth leading cause of death in this country being killed by celebrities so you got your alec baldwin slaying one person this week you got your nfl players killing people with their automobiles you got travis scott gives a concert and kills eight people then you've got all your celebrities who are so thin that is causing a generation of kids to have body image problems and die of eating disorders and suicide and here's a question i ask you so there are several examples of celebrities have killed people just this week there are three examples of celebrities killing people within the week or two weeks i guess now think about your profession so those of you who are working think about your job how many people in your job killed anybody in the last two weeks let's say you're an accountant let's say you scoop ice cream at the baskin-robbins how many ice cream scoopers killed anybody in the last two weeks very low number very low number but how many how many celebrities killed people a lot a lot right and it's funny it's no it's not funny it's tragic of course but it's gotten to the point where it might be the fourth leading cause for anybody over under 30.

you know just stay away from any celebrity related thing now i'm not even just think about how much you could pump up the number killed by celebrities think of all the things that celebrities have promoted in public that you should do or not do that probably killed people probably probably a few right uh depending on your political leanings if you if you're of the camp that says abortion is murder then you've got the celebrities you know supporting abortion so depending on your point of view you'd say well let's chalk up some more to the celebrities i know celebrities seem very very dangerous is what i'm saying that's what i'm saying all right pretty sure that's all i wanted to talk about today oh no i would like to remind you at the beginning of the pandemic one of my predictions was that you can't tell how any country you would do in the first few innings anybody remember me saying that just so we can verify that i said that right from the beginning i said you won't be able to tell what countries are making the right decisions and that leadership won't even be a variable you can isolate everybody thought that that you could do that i think i'm the only person who said from the start you'll never be able to do it so what's the news today well it's the opposite of what it used to be and yet leadership hasn't changed so there's probably not that much difference in leadership in europe versus the united states but suddenly europe's having problems that we're not having so europe's now the epicenter of the pandemic as of today germany reported his highest number of new coronavirus infections in one day since the pandemic began um and new new cases across europe have risen 56 and everything now i'm not going to tell you that the united states did better than europe what i will tell you is we don't know what why anything is working we still don't like you know even the most basic thing which is well the most vaccinated country should be in the best shape that doesn't even seem to hold at this point but the one thing i'm pretty sure is true is that there wasn't enough of difference in leadership changing in the united states really in terms of the pandemic even biden isn't that much different than trump would have been i don't think europe changed that much leadership wise so leadership just doesn't predict is there anybody who's willing to agree with me at this point that leadership did not predict outcomes anybody is anybody willing to agree with me that leadership did not predict outcomes oh i got some agreement okay nope all right so we got we have some agreement there that's all i can ask for all right here's a you here's a little uh thing from twitter you know twitter does this cool thing where if there's a big story and lots of tweeting on it they'll have they'll put their own editorial summary of what's going on with all the tweeting on that topic and i always like that because it's a real good fast way to learn what's going on so i like the feature a lot but here's one way that they describe something and let and you tell me if this is biased or not right i'll just read the summary it's a bullet point one of three bullets under what you need to know that i assume twitter editorial wrote and i quote public health officials warn against taking ivermectin a drug often prescribed for animals that can be dangerous for people to treat kophan 19.

now does that sound a little bit biased do you think there was a better way to phrase this so you didn't suggest that people taking it were taking a horse medicine which of course is horseshit this is this is like just mind-boggling that somebody could write this sentence here here would be an honest uh version of this uh public health officials warn against taking ivermectin uh especially the the animal version of it because it hasn't shown to be uh effective according according to them this is not me talking um and the animal version especially could be dangerous to humans now it takes a little bit longer but it's but at least it's clear right i would like to know that there's an animal in a human version and i would like to know that if you took the animal version you might have some problems but if you took the human version not so much and that's the story right shacky is still saying ivor meccans save lives all over africa i don't think so i don't think so uh you and i know you've seen the information that suggests that that's i don't think that's going to stand up i would make a very large bet that ivermecton is not saving africa i mean i don't know what's going on there but and i like i'd like to say also whenever i make a statement like that i can never be 100 sure can you accept that even when i talk with confidence you can't really be 100 sure of anything we don't live in a world where anybody can do that not me not you not anybody so when i say things that sound like absolutes just in your mind translate that into not quite an absolute all right um and now i believe i've done my tiny bit of duty to help the supply chain because i feel like the supply chain problem is one of those things where there are enough brains and resources in existence but hasn't quite hasn't quite uh you know been focused in the right places at the right time by the right people and ryan peterson i would say is the most productive person on this and if i could give him a boost to you know boost his signal then i think that collectively we've done something good because you know it goes without saying but i'll say it anyway you know people always say after they say it goes down saying they always say it anyway that my uh my ability to boost um ryan peterson's signal which i think has been productive and it may have been part of what got the governor to call him we don't know for sure but you can only do that because there are a lot of people paying attention so that is all your power um if if i helped you focus it in a productive way that would be great uh yeah infrastructure bill got passed so boring um so that's the part that a lot of people agreed on just the pure infrastructure the real infrastructure part uh and how would you know if that's a good idea how would any of you know if the infrastructure bill and by the way they they've separated out the social programs and now that's that's going to be part of the build back better separate bill but the one that really was infrastructure which i get would have taken three years to get an infrastructure bill so you can't be too happy about that but how would you know it's not all just pork and how do you know it's in that thing i don't i don't know i mean i like the idea of infrastructure now here's another question we started this infrastructure bill thing in 2018 when the economy was a very different economy it was pre-pandemic you know pre-massive run-up of the debt uh at least as much as it did run up and here's my question and i don't know the answer to it so it's not it's not a fake question it's a real question should we be stimulating the economy right now is there anybody here who is good enough in economic i mean i have a degree in economics and i don't know the answer to this question is this the right time to be stimulating the economy because it feels like the wrong time doesn't because you know our our jobs are coming back strongly we're ordering more things than our our capacity to deliver and inflation is high now i don't know what the supply chain is going to do to inflation should should drive it up blah blah blah but is anybody reporting that the infrastructure bill might be a huge disaster because only because of its timing not because it's a good or bad idea in and of itself is anybody writing that is that a story even or are all the smart people saying i don't worry about that because you need i mean we need the infrastructure right so it might be that we don't have a choice you just gotta you have to have good roads you need more broadband you just need this stuff um yeah i don't know how much of it is junk and pork and stuff like that get rid of the vaccine mandates well i would say that the if these pfizer and the other pill if they get approved and they really stop it in its tracks and you can really do rapid testing i feel like we've got to open up at that point you know i've told you before somebody says i work for the cia all right did they assign you to watch me today uh you know a while back i learned how intelligence agencies approach citizens and try to try to influence them and once you know how they do it you can spot it pretty easily and i've got one now that's that's trying to uh approach me um and i would say they they act very different from normal people i'm not going to tell you what they do i don't want to tell you that but but it's easy to spot i can't tell you all right um russia collusion was an insurrection i think so and that would also explain oh here's some more over on locals people are posting all kinds of pictures of uh large devices that move containers and so there are portable ones they don't have to be cranes all right um uh national guard has some national guard have some container movers yeah i imagine they would all right that is all i have to talk about today uh if my energy was low that's because that three hours of sleep but i hope we made the world a better place and i hope you're all a little bit more cautious about imagining what you can do with your own research yes i know i am if there's one place that you can uh guarantee i will be humble because i know some of you have a problem with me being right too much but where i guarantee you i'll always be humble is that i can't do my own research on any of this i mean i can i can talk myself into thinking i did it but i can't so i mean if you're substantially smarter than me in this particular way maybe you can but uh i know i can't so unless you're pretty sure you're way smarter than than i am about how to analyze stuff i don't think you can either not with confidence anyway not with any confidence um what kept me awake i i hate sleep so when i woke up i just didn't want to be asleep again and then it doesn't happen i feel like sleep is just wasted wasted life but i will tell you i've been thinking more and more about the the state of what a dream is have you ever have you ever said to yourself the one way that you know this is not a simulation is that the stuff is solid do you ever think to think that to yourself well i know that whatever this is that i'm experiencing my reality i know it can't be just code or pro program because they're solids right it doesn't go through it you know if i were made of software or some imaginary thing none of this could happen right it wouldn't be solid but what about dreams in your dreams everything's solid isn't it in your dreams things have weight don't they in your dreams there's still gravity so apparently we absolutely routinely pretty much most of us every night have an illusion in which there is full weight and gravity and all the rules of physics sometimes you can fly in your dreams sometimes but the question of whether you can imagine solids when there are no solids it has been answered yeah you can it's called a dream that's just one way you can do it all right which is different than virtual reality because when you've got a virtual reality goggles on you can't actually feel any of the objects so that's that's less than a dream a dream a dream you have the sensation that objects have weight dreams are software updates could be or defragmenting it feels like defragging to me so scott doesn't have spirituality i guess it's all just a waste is it i have no physical sensation in youtube well but the rules of physics apply in your dreams is what i'm saying um i learned your lesson about doing your own research trying to figure out how to do a live broadcast yeah that that's that's a pretty humbling thing now some of you are going to say but scott what about that uh situation you gave us with the spasmodic dysphonia and googling your own voice problem that's an exception and one of the things that makes an exception is that once i found it i could verify it so having having found it on my own that i could easily take it to an expert i could find an expert once i had a name for it and then the expert could say oh yeah you're right and then you know my research just ends up being the same as science you know i end up in the same place so that's really a special case and i do think that that you that a motivated person can do a slice but i don't think we can evaluate studies very well most of us all right that is all i have for today i believe i'm babbling and i'm going to say goodbye to you youtube talk to you later

good morning everybody and welcome

to the best thing that ever happened to

you

and maybe anybody else it's called

coffee with scott adams and there's a

little thing called the simultaneous set

that's coming up in a moment but i have

to set the stage

have i ever told you how much i hate

sleeping

i'm the only person i know i'm sure

there are others but i hate sleeping

and so

i wake up just naturally quite early i

start work four

four a.m usually it'd be my ideal time

to start work

so last night

i

woke up in bed and i thought to myself

you know

i i think i'm just going to get up

because i was awake

and i didn't really check the clock

because

my internal clock's pretty accurate i

thought that's pretty close to 4 am

give or take

so i got up

it turned out to be 1 45

1 45 is when i woke up this morning

and i was already up and around and

patting the dog and i thought

you two

vet vegas

so

let's just say that the quality of this

live

stream

might be a little bit lower than what

you used to

i'm just trying to set the expectations

but

still

despite all of that

how terrific is it going to be to do the

simultaneous simple it's going to be

amazing you know you use a cupra mug or

a glass of tiger jealous it's not a

canteen junk a flask a vessel of any

kind

fill it with your favorite liquid i like

coffee

and join me now for the unparalleled

pleasure of the dopamine of the day

thing makes everything better

especially your antibodies it's called

the simultaneous sip and it happens now

go

um i don't know about you but sometimes

if you're leaning

when you have the simultaneous step

it'll it'll stimulate the antibodies

only on the lower side of your body

so if you did if you made the mistake i

did which was leaning while you did it

try try this

lean the other way

there we go there we go

antibodies stimulated

and evenly distributed now we're in good

shape

all right uh question for all of you i

was just chatting with the local

subscribers before i fired up youtube

and asked i'm going to ask you the same

question on youtube

is body language real

in other words is it a skill which you

can learn

and apply

or maybe you've already learned it

and and then you apply it

is body language real go

yes yes yes

yes yes absolutely yes yes yes

yes yes yes okay looks like we have

universal agreement that body language

is real question number two

how do you know you're good at reading

it

yeah you're not so certain now are you

here's my observation

it doesn't matter if body language is

real or not

for most purposes

it doesn't matter

because you don't know if you're good at

reading it

that's the problem

the problem is not whether

body language is real

the problem is you think you can read it

and you can't

you're terrible at it

uh it's the same problem with pattern

recognition right our brains are pattern

recognition machines

and

we see patterns and we think they mean

something even when they don't that's

why we have science to

to essentially get around our own

illusions about patterns

well

don't you think that your pattern

recognition

is what's driving your interpretation of

body language

all right so now you all think that body

language is is a real thing

and you got real quiet here's my next

question

you ready to have your brain blown off

you ready you ready

how many of you

listening or watching right now

have been accused of feeling something

you did not feel

because somebody you know

misread your body language how many this

week

this week

i'll read your uh messages

all the time most of the time me me me

yep often yup yup yup yes true true true

yes true

every now read

here

every day

a few knows

every day every day yes yes yes every

day

all right now now

you see where i'm going here

if body language reading were a real

thing

don't you think they'd read your your

body language right

don't you think that the people who

accuse you of being let's say angry when

you weren't angry or

not interested when you were interested

whatever it was they were they were

blaming uf

don't you think that the person who did

that thought that they were good at

reading body language

wouldn't you say

probably every person who falsely

accused you because they read your body

language wrong i'll bet every one of

them

thought they did it well

right

it's sort of like do your own research

how many of you think that it's uh

wise and notable to do your own research

there's a big story most of you seen it

about quarterback aaron rodgers

who is getting a lot of attention

because he

was fairly eloquent in describing his

process of

deciding whether to get vaccinated or

not he decided apparently not to

he he thought there were some risks of

allergic reactions in his case that

might be unique to him

i don't know if that's a thing

do you

is that a thing

did

i don't know i mean i looked it up but i

couldn't find that it's a thing but he

thinks it's a thing

now

if i asked you should you do your own

research and talk to your doctor

to decide what to do most of you would

say what

should you do your own research on let's

say anything but vaccinations

and then talk to your doctor

that's the way you should handle it

right do your own research and talk to

your doctor how many of you think you

should only do one of those

only your own research

or only talk to your own doctor

nobody right

you would all agree

100 that you should do your own research

and then talk to your doctor

you know doctors are saying different

things right

they're not all they're all saying the

same thing

so how do you know you got the right

doctor

you're basically imagining that you were

good at picking a doctor

you probably didn't pick your doctor

most of you just sort of took the doctor

that was there because you don't know

how to pick a good doctor from a bad

doctor

so and

similar to uh getting a financial

advisor

there are more financial advisors than

there are stocks

how do you know you got a good financial

advisor they don't they don't beat the

market

more than a monkey with a dartboard

they usually do worse than a monkey with

a dartboard

let's say compared to index funds

so here's the problem that we run into

all the time

body language is totally real

but you can't do it

you just think you can

financial analysis in which you look at

the pros and cons of companies and study

their balance sheets and look at their

business model and study the management

quality

that's very real

you can't do it

but you think you can you think he can

likewise doing your own research to

decide what you should do about

vaccinations

you think you can do that

but you can't

you can't likewise almost everything

that you see on twitter that's a graph

or a chart or is proving something

you think you can read that and come to

a decision that's pretty good

but you can't

you don't have those skills

nobody does

basically nobody does

you know i

the reason that i continually promote

people like andres backhouse and

anatoly lebarsky is that they seem to be

very close to having those skills but of

course nobody's right all the time

right

so when you don't know how bad you are

of something

until you see somebody who's good at it

would you agree with that

would you agree that generally speaking

it's impossible to know how bad you are

or something until you meet somebody

who's good at it

take singing for example

i suppose you had never met a good

singer

you probably thought you could do it

and then you meet mariah carey and you

say oh okay i don't know what i was

doing but that wasn't singing

that singing

whatever i was doing i don't even know

what that was anymore

right so the problem is you'll never

meet somebody who's good at body

language because there aren't many of

them i don't know if there are any of

them really but i'm assuming that the

people who study it

you know professionally probably are

pretty good at it

pretty good but you're never going to

meet them

right and it's not you

so you should all i would encourage you

to do is have some humility

about the assumption that you can do

your own research now let me

give you my macro opinion of aaron

rodgers bunch of people

sent me his video and said hey this is

really persuasive

this guy gets it

and

here's where he lost me

he lost me when he called himself a

critical thinker

so far so good right called himself a

critical thinker and then he

demonstrated it by saying that he did

his own research

that's where he lost me

because if you're a critical thinker you

know you can't

if he were a critical thinker he would

know that he can't do his own research

not in any reliable way

i mean even if he were a top researcher

he probably couldn't

let me give you another example

the director of the cdc i guess recently

claimed that

face masks are 80 percent effective

really

really is there anybody who believes

that face masks are 80

effective 80 percent

even the people who are in favor of them

are are giving numbers that are like sub

20 and we're not even entirely sure

about that

right

so uh of course

uh this caused somebody in the comments

to that there was a tweet about it

and as soon as i saw it i thought that

must be a typo

didn't you think that

if you saw that the the head the

director of the cdc

the director

if you if you read something that said

she thought mass were 80 effective

wouldn't you think that was a typo

or just

didn't really happen

but apparently it did

it did and apparently and i didn't know

this there are a whole bunch of studies

that show that maths are

70 to 80 percent effective in certain

situations that are basically not this

one

how long did it take

for somebody to reply to the tweet

that showed a whole bunch of studies

that show masks totally work

how long did it take somebody to paste a

whole bunch of studies

the show masks

totally don't work

about a second

so right next to each other on twitter

is a link to an article that mentions a

whole bunch of studies masks totally

work and then another one a whole bunch

of studies masks totally don't work

so when aaron rodgers goes to do his own

research

how does he sort that out

now he was talking about vaccinations

not masks but it's a perfect example

do you think aaron rodgers with whatever

skill stack he brings to this

could be a critical thinker

and then sort out whether mass work or

not

with two completely different sets of

answers

i can't

could you

how many of you could do that

right so he did his own research but

it's absurd

because he never knows what he doesn't

know

right

if you're outside of a if you're from

the outside of the area of expertise

unless you're unusually smart

you know unless you're uh you know elon

musk smart

you can't enter somebody else's field

and and like

figure it out

that's not a thing

you know it's it's a thing for the the

smartest among us but it's not a thing

generally speaking and certainly another

thing that aaron rodgers did so when he

calls himself a critical thinker i

challenge that because a critical

thinker would know that you can't do

what he claims to have done

it's not doable

with

the brains we have and the information

that's available to us it's just not

doable in any rational way

all right let's talk about this

i am so interested in the steele dossier

story update

because something's happening right

and i don't know exactly what it is

because

the some parts of the media are treating

it like it's not even a story

but it looks like it's the biggest story

and so we have these two movies running

at the same time

that is the biggest thing i've seen in

years

or it's nothing

or you know just some weasels did some

lying that's about it

so it's either some weasels did some

lying

or hillary clinton was behind or her

campaign was behind

a legitimate plan to overthrow the

basically to cheat in the major election

and or overthrow

a sitting president once trump was

elected

it's either what is it is it the worst

thing in the world or is it nothing

do your own research

go go look at the media do you think you

can figure it out

if it's nothing or it's a whole bunch

well

i think this story is telling you

how deeply the

intelligence

assets in this country are embedded in

the media

that's all this is telling us right

you know as glenn greenwald often tweets

and writes

that the public isn't fully aware

that major parts of our media are just

controlled by

the cia or cia assets or

some damn intelligence

you know units of the government

and

this isn't

this isn't conspiracy theory stuff

this is really well documented stuff

i don't know if anybody even

i don't think there's anybody serious

who even doubts it right

that our intelligence agencies directly

influence the news

and

so when you see that this story is sort

of semi-disappeared

there it's definitely covered

and the opinion people are talking about

it but it should be the main story

i think

and yet

sort of downplayed everywhere

now

actually that's an exaggeration the

washington post covered it

so give them that jonathan jonathan swan

i think he's axios

uh tweeted that the tweet of the

washington post coverage so i looked on

axios to see the coverage and there

wasn't anything today

but i'm sure they covered it originally

and so jonathan swann

summarizes the washington post coverage

of it this way

he says the charges are not only

did clinton slash democrats fund the

dossier but a long time clinton dem

operative was one of the sources for the

rumors about trump

and then he summarizes that by saying

doesn't get much worse

right

right as in this the biggest story

it doesn't get much worse

but it's not the biggest story

do you see now

that the uh

do you see now

that

um

there's somebody deciding what a story

is

you get that right

there's somebody

and it probably varies depending on what

the story is

but somebody controls

whether or not the world thinks it

matters

and amazingly whoever that is or those

people or entities or

a series of forces whatever it is has

decided that this won't get attention

it's really freaky isn't it when you see

it in real time

when you see that the news is just not

even close to real it's just

it's just a brainwashing operation you

can't see who's pulling the strings all

the time but sometimes you can see the

strings

this is one of those times when you can

see the strings you're like hey hey hey

i can actually see those strings

and it won't matter

what are you going to do about it

so let's say you and i see this the

how bad this story is what are you going

to do about it

no that's right what am i going to do

about it i can't think of anything i can

do about it

wait i don't know

so it's a weird story it's the biggest

story ever

treat it like it's nothing

to be even more amazed

turns out that rachel maddow is running

a report

that durham you know the very same

person who's coming out with this new

information

and barr ex ag bar intentionally ignored

emails that quote prove

trump was in direct communications with

the russian alpha bank

a covert community communication channel

existed

during the 2016 campaign that bar and

durham knew was real but they covered up

boomerang

says

rachel maddow gotcha

so

are any of the other major media

covering that story

where's that story on cnn

i didn't see it

where's that story on fox news

i don't know i didn't see it

did she just make this up

this is just totally made up

and

don't you think there's a little context

missing

so she claims that there are emails that

durham and barr saw but ignored

what what is the missing context

they saw it

and they ignored it

the missing context is why did they

ignore it

probably because it was bs or

unimportant or

some trivial email

probably

there's nothing here and rachel maddow

has decided to

turn it into something

who controls msnbc

depends who you ask

some would say intelligence agencies

i can't confirm that but that's a that's

a common claim

if you're an intelligence agency

wouldn't you want to create the counter

narrative that oh no it really was trump

who is colluding with russia after all

this is so heavy-handed

this is like really obvious heavy-handed

manipulation of the public it's kind of

crazy and here's the thing it's totally

working

no matter how easily you can see the the

puppet strings and say hey hey this is

clearly manipulation and a trick

it still works

because again what the hell are you

going to do about it

take your story to the media

hey i see what's going on here i think

i'll

i'll call my contacts at cnn and report

it

seriously what the hell are you going to

do about it as long as the media is

going to cover it the way they're

covering it that's

sort of the end of it

there's nothing you can do

what are you going to do call tim poole

if he if he doesn't uh if he recovers

from his

uh covet

i mean

the independents are so small relative

to the major media that

there's nothing you can do

all

right that story just fascinates the

whole enemy that you can make something

like that disappear

so pfizer announced that they've got a

covenant pill that

at least in the test they had zero

deaths from people who took the coven

pill soon after having symptoms

and

uh

reduces deaths 89 or something like that

now

if you've got a pill and i imagine this

will get approved pretty quickly

that reduces it by 89

aren't you done

like

isn't this pill the the get back to work

bill

because

if you've got the vaccinations

themselves

and of course not everyone will take

them but they reduce the risk you know

by some enormous amount

then you've got this pill and that

reduces it by an enormous amount

you've got the monoclonal antibodies we

know that works we know the vitamin d

drip works um at least a few other

things we know work

so each of these has like takes a big

percentage out of the total risk

where the once the pfizer pill is here

and one's like it you know the um who

was it uh

uh i forget the other company that has a

pill

but i feel like we're done when we have

those

don't you

i mean i've i felt like this before so

maybe this is false optimism

but

how

how much better would it be if you've

got these pills that work so long as you

you take them early how much better

would things be if we had rapid tests

that you that are so cheap you could

just do one every day

suppose you could for one dollar test

yourself every day

and

you know not everybody would spend 365

dollars per person in their household

but a lot of people would

a lot of people would and you would get

at least the the super spreaders but if

you were catching a fast and taking the

pill fast

i feel like we're done

right i mean i don't know when we'll all

have availability of these pills

and

then the real question is do you just

buy these pills and keep them around

all right you know i'm sure they're

prescription

but wouldn't it be great if you could

just get some and keep them because you

don't want to have that time lag between

a dry cough and getting the prescription

because that you know that could be

eight hours right by the time you

yeah if you wake up in the middle of

night with a dry cough it could be hours

and hours so wouldn't you like to test

yourself grab a pill

you're done you've already treated

yourself go back to bed

alone in quarantine

all right

so apparently there was a claim that the

uh the uk version of the drug that got

approved

um was really just ivermectin

now oh i'm sorry there was some thought

that maybe the pfizer one or somebody

else's anyway the claim is false

and the claim was that one of these

companies was just

repurposing ivormectin

and here's a little tip for you

you can always assume that fraud is

hiding in any complicated environment

a complicated environment would be

finance

definitely fraud there

science

definitely fraud there

and we hear about it all the time it's

obvious right and

so the more confusing it is the more

likely is fraud but

when you heard the first time you heard

this rumor

that one of these big companies was just

going to try to slip ivermectin into a

different name of a pill

that

you should have known that wasn't a

thing

because it would be too easy to catch

them

right

how hard would it be for somebody to

just you know somebody who knows how to

do it to take a look at it and say uh

this is just ivermectin

you guys have been screwing us it would

be so easy

to find it out it would be ridiculous

for them to try that

uh zunar says wrong what are you going

to do well what you're going to do is

start taking ivermectin

that's what you're going to do if

and again the rumor is false so so

there's no uh

persuasive evidence that ivory mechton

works as far as i know

but

i also wouldn't know

um

all right good comment though sooner

so i would just say that the only reason

anybody would believe this ivermectin

rumor that is really the

the drug that's in these other pills

rebranded is because we'll believe

anything now

like nothing seems off the table does it

when you hear this story about the

steele dossier the the real way it was

created

doesn't it almost feel to you

as if there's just nothing that's off

the table anymore just anything's

possible

am i right

so you can make up any rumor and

somebody's going to believe it because

people say well

that's not any worse than the five

things i heard on the news that might be

true

yeah we've lost all trust that that is

true

um

how would you like me to fix

the supply chain problem

you ready

now remember i'm never totally serious

when i say stuff like that

but i think it's fun to talk about it

i'll give you a little background

i

tweeted and talked to you the other day

and i said

that one of the secrets of persuasion is

that whoever makes the best visual graph

of whatever the problem or solution is

whoever does the best job of the

visualization part ends up being in

charge

because the visualization

tells people what to do for the first

time

because if it's a complicated situation

people can't read through it and decide

what they want to do but if you give

them a nice clean

chart or pie chart or visualization

and it's accurate

people suddenly will line up behind it

say oh okay now we know what to do we

know what the problem is etcetera

so

the the power of being good at creating

visualizations is way underrated

because i used to do that you know for

my corporate jobs

and i discovered that

basically i was running the department

because i could make the visualization

compelling or not for whatever i wanted

and it felt like the chart making person

was running stuff it certainly felt like

that when i was making the charts

because because i could make them good

or bad if i wanted

so

hearing my explanation of the power of

charts ryan peterson ceo of flexport who

you already know because he did a

terrific thread in which he went to

actually visited the ports he's a you

know he works in this industry so he

knows what questions they ask and

where to look for problems

and he came up with a pretty good

analysis a very good analysis actually

so good that the governor of california

called him to see what was going on see

if he could help

so it was that good

and uh and then he followed up with

building a presentation that's really

good

really good so you can see it on my

twitter feed or just

look for ryan peterson the send part on

the end is sen petersen

ceo of flexport and you can see his

stuff there and i recommend it

because i think it's really fun actually

weirdly

because i'm a total nerd about business

models

does anybody else have that

yeah i went to business school and so i

just got hooked on business models

like what what is it that makes some

company have a process that makes money

and it's different some others

yeah i see some other people saying the

same thing

that

business models are just endlessly

fascinating to me

so anyway seeing seeing this flowchart

of what the problem is and i'll let me

quickly summarize the problem

you think the problem was truck drivers

right

how many of you have been told

the problem is not enough truck drivers

well that is a problem-ish

but it's not the immediate problem it's

not the reason stuff is backed up

because there are drivers sitting in

trucks

with an empty

container on the back

and they don't have any place to put the

empty

so you have you have drivers all over

the place with just an empty on the back

and no place to put it

so they can't pick up a new one so they

can't do any work because they can't get

rid of the one that's on the back now

why can't they get rid of the one in the

back well the ports

got slammed with the the pandemic

traffic because people bought more goods

than they consumed services so people's

spending patterns radically changed

and they started buying stuff because

they were stuck at home instead of going

on a vacation

and buying gas and stuff

so

that momentary shock of the system

caused a build up that rippled and the

ripple was

that they didn't have a place to put the

empty containers and then that slows

everything down because they're in the

way

now part of the solution was uh getting

approval to stack some of the containers

in places that they couldn't stack them

or in ways that they couldn't stack them

before

and i think that

ryan peterson was instrumental in

getting that happening quickly so it

made a little bit of a difference

it's not the solution

but the big problem

is

that there are you need a special kind

of chassis in other words the the part

that's behind the the big rig truck it

has to be a special kind for a empty ca

or any kind of container to be uh

carried on

and there aren't enough of those

to carry the new traffic because they're

all used up with an empty on it they

can't go anywhere now you say to

yourself scott this is the easiest

problem in the world to solve

just take all those trucks with the

empties the government just say okay

temporarily here's a farmer's field it's

an emergency farmer says it's okay we'll

give them some money just drive to this

empty field and just put all your empty

containers there right

how do you get them off the truck

how do you get the container off the

truck

you need that crane

that's back at the port

you can't get them off the truck

except at the port

and do you know why you can't get them

off the truck at the port

because it's already filled with empty

containers

so the cranes the cranes and the trucks

can't get near each other even the

cranes are not being used

because there's nothing but uh trucks

with empties and empties all over the

place

and that's your problem

oh you're you're ahead of me so here's

my question

all right

suppose you took the best engineers in

the world

and you put them in the metaverse so

they could have a meeting in

in the

zuckerberg's

virtual world so it feels like they're

there and you take you know your elon

musk's i like to use them for every

example he just fits every example it

seems like you take your elon musk you

take your you know best

engineers from a few different places

and you just put them in one place

you say here's the problem

the normal way that

empties are taken off is with the same

crane i think fact-check me on this the

same crane that they use at the ports to

do everything else that the cranes do

so the cranes as they're built

are sort of

multi-purpose

for the ports

but suppose

you wanted to

very quickly develop a an engineering

solution that would simply

take an empty off

the first thing the first advantage is

that you're only dealing with empties

so if you were to build a crane or

or a forklift type device whatever it

would take

you wouldn't have to make it very strong

compared to the ones at the port

because the port has to take full

containers

as well as empties so that has to be way

way way stronger

but if you're only dealing with the

empties and it's an emergency you just

want to get empties off chassis

could you

modify a forklift

could you

build one of those magnet things that

just picks it off as long as you've

disconnected it somehow from the chassis

could you do it with a giant magnet

how long would it take a caterpillar for

example to modify anything that they

have existing

they can very quickly just grab empties

and and

toss them off

right

so suppose you did a you know it's an

overused concept but basically a

manhattan project to find a temporary

engineering solution for removing

empties from chassis

not at the port

so

you know is there such a thing

is there anybody who knows is there such

a thing as that like just a

badass forklift that's big enough to

take an entire empty container off a

truck is there such a thing

and could you modify

some other piece of equipment or

equipments

that could do that

oh there it is there's somebody gave me

the

actual picture of a forklift that's

meant for exactly that

so how hard would it be to get a few

forklifts in some big farmer fields

so i'm saying yes they already exist

so i so you don't really need to move

the crane

anywhere do you maybe just these

forklifts

yeah

so i guess there's there's more

questions right

remember i told you uh every time you

think you can do your own research

you just find out that that's not

something you can do

so here's a perfect example so here i am

trying to do my own research

but you know it's not my full-time job

just like it isn't most people's

full-time job to research anything

and

i don't know what's going on

still because

if there exists and i can see that they

do exist

these giant forklifts

probably they're all being used at the

ports themselves

but it seems like maybe for a day or two

you could at least get a few of them and

just

outsource them to the farmer's field or

wherever

uh yeah redesigned the trucks to be

self-emptying so i just tweeted there is

such a device so there are trucks that

are self-unloading

so it looks like they've got some kind

of a roller thing so they just dip it

down and let the then they drive away

slowly and that

and the container just

but i don't think they make those for

too many chassis

um

forklifts can't run on soft ground good

point

good point so you need some kind of

paved situation

that's a really good point

but they could if it's packed down they

could if it's packed down dirt they

could probably

maybe not

too heavy

all right

um

you did you hear about travis scott he

has this festival called the astro world

in houston

and apparently the crowd uh

surged it's not clear why and eight

people died and hundreds were injured

and stuff

and

is it my imagination or is the fourth

leading cause of death in this country

being killed by celebrities

so you got your alec baldwin

slaying one person this week you got

your nfl players killing people with

their automobiles

you got travis scott gives a concert

and kills eight people

then you've got all your celebrities who

are so thin

that is causing a generation of kids to

have body image

problems and die of eating disorders and

suicide

and

here's a question i ask you

so there are

several examples of celebrities have

killed people

just this week

there are three examples of celebrities

killing people

within the week

or two weeks i guess

now

think about your profession

so those of you who are working

think about your job how many people in

your job killed anybody in the last two

weeks

let's say you're an accountant

let's say you scoop ice cream at the

baskin-robbins how many ice cream

scoopers killed anybody in the last two

weeks

very low number

very low number

but how many how many celebrities killed

people

a lot

a lot right

and it's funny it's no it's not funny

it's tragic of course but it's gotten to

the point where

it might be the fourth leading cause for

anybody over under 30.

you know just stay away from any

celebrity related thing now i'm not even

just think about how much you could pump

up the number killed by celebrities

think of all the things that celebrities

have

promoted in public that you should do or

not do that probably killed people

probably

probably a few right

uh

depending on your political leanings if

you

if you're of the camp that says abortion

is murder then you've got the

celebrities you know supporting abortion

so depending on your point of view you'd

say well let's chalk up some more to the

celebrities i know celebrities seem very

very dangerous is what i'm saying

that's what i'm saying

all right

pretty sure that's all i wanted to talk

about today

oh no

i would like to remind you

at the beginning of the pandemic

one of my predictions was

that you can't tell how any country you

would do

in the first few innings

anybody remember me saying that just so

we can verify that i said that right

from the beginning

i said you won't be able to tell what

countries are making the right decisions

and that leadership won't even be a

variable you can isolate

everybody thought that that you could do

that i think i'm the only person who

said from the start

you'll never be able to do it

so what's the news today well it's the

opposite of what it used to be and yet

leadership hasn't changed

so there's probably not that much

difference in leadership in europe

versus the united states but suddenly

europe's having problems that we're not

having

so europe's now the epicenter of the

pandemic as of today

germany reported his highest number of

new coronavirus infections in one day

since the pandemic began

um and new new cases across europe have

risen 56 and everything now i'm not

going to tell you that the united states

did better than europe

what i will tell you is we don't know

what why anything is working

we still don't

like you know even the most basic thing

which is well the most vaccinated

country should be in the best shape

that doesn't even seem to hold

at this point but the one thing i'm

pretty sure is true is that there wasn't

enough of difference in leadership

changing in the united states really in

terms of the pandemic even biden isn't

that much different than trump would

have been

i don't think europe changed that much

leadership wise so leadership just

doesn't predict

is there anybody who's willing to agree

with me at this point

that leadership

did not predict

outcomes anybody is anybody willing to

agree with me that leadership did not

predict outcomes

oh i got some agreement okay

nope

all right so we got we have some

agreement there that's all i can ask for

all right here's a you here's a little

uh thing from

twitter you know twitter does this cool

thing where if there's a big story and

lots of tweeting on it they'll have

they'll put their own editorial

summary of

what's going on with all the tweeting on

that topic

and i always like that because it's a

real good fast way to learn what's going

on so i like the feature a lot

but here's one way that they describe

something and let and you tell me

if this is biased or not right i'll just

read the summary it's a bullet point

one of three bullets under what you need

to know that i assume twitter editorial

wrote and i quote public health

officials

warn against taking ivermectin a drug

often prescribed for animals that can be

dangerous for people to treat kophan 19.

now

does that sound

a little bit biased

do you think there was a better way to

phrase this so you didn't suggest that

people taking it were taking a horse

medicine which of course is horseshit

this is

this is like

just mind-boggling

that somebody could write this sentence

here here would be an honest

uh version of this

uh public health officials warn against

taking ivermectin

uh especially the the animal version of

it

because it hasn't shown to be uh

effective according according to them

this is not me talking

um and the animal version especially

could be dangerous to humans

now it takes a little bit longer

but it's but at least it's clear

right

i would like to know that there's an

animal in a human version and i would

like to know that if you took the animal

version you might have some problems but

if you took the human version not so

much

and that's the story right

shacky is still saying ivor meccans save

lives all over africa i don't think so

i don't think so

uh

you and i know you've seen the

information that suggests that

that's i don't think that's going to

stand up i would make a very large bet

that ivermecton is not saving africa

i mean i don't know what's going on

there

but

and

i like i'd like to say also whenever i

make a statement like that

i can never be 100 sure

can you accept

that even when i talk with confidence

you can't really be 100 sure of anything

we don't live in a world where anybody

can do that not me not you not anybody

so when i say things that sound like

absolutes just in your mind

translate that into not quite an

absolute

all right

um

and now

i believe i've done my tiny bit of duty

to help the supply chain

because i feel like the supply chain

problem is one of those things where

there are enough

brains and resources in existence

but hasn't quite

hasn't quite uh you know been focused in

the right places at the right time by

the right people and ryan peterson i

would say is the most productive person

on this

and if i could give him a boost to you

know boost his signal

then i think that collectively we've

done something good

because you know it goes without saying

but i'll say it anyway

you know people always say after they

say it goes down saying they always say

it anyway

that my uh my ability to boost um ryan

peterson's signal which i think has been

productive

and it may have been part of what got

the governor to call him we don't know

for sure

but

you can only do that because

there are a lot of people paying

attention

so that is all your power

um if if i helped you focus it

in a productive way that would be great

uh yeah infrastructure bill got passed

so boring um

so that's the part that a lot of people

agreed on just the pure infrastructure

the real infrastructure part

uh and

how would you know if that's a good idea

how would any of you

know if the infrastructure bill and by

the way they they've separated out the

social programs and now that's that's

going to be part of the build back

better separate bill

but the one that really was

infrastructure which i get would have

taken three years to get an

infrastructure bill

so you can't be too happy about that but

how would you know it's not all just

pork and

how do you know it's in that thing

i don't

i don't know

i mean i like the idea of

infrastructure

now here's another question

we started this infrastructure bill

thing in 2018 when the economy was a

very different economy

it was pre-pandemic you know pre-massive

run-up of the debt

uh at least as much as it did run up

and here's my question and i don't know

the answer to it so it's not

it's not

a fake question it's a real question

should we be stimulating the economy

right now

is there anybody here who is good enough

in economic i mean i have a degree in

economics and i don't know the answer to

this question

is this the right time to be stimulating

the economy

because it feels like the wrong time

doesn't

because you know our our jobs are coming

back strongly

we're ordering more things than our our

capacity to deliver

and inflation is high

now i don't know what the supply chain

is going to do to inflation should

should drive it up blah blah blah

but

is anybody reporting

that the infrastructure bill might be a

huge disaster because only because of

its timing not because it's a good or

bad idea

in and of itself is anybody writing that

is that a story even or are all the

smart people saying i don't worry about

that

because you need i mean we need the

infrastructure right so it might be that

we don't have a choice

you just gotta you have to have good

roads you need

more broadband you just need this stuff

um

yeah i don't know how much of it is junk

and pork and stuff like that

get rid of the vaccine mandates well

i would say that

the

if these pfizer and the other pill

if they get approved and they really

stop it in its tracks and you can really

do

rapid testing

i feel like

we've got to open up at that point

you know i've told you before

somebody says i work for the cia

all right

did they assign you to watch me today

uh

you know

a while back i learned

how intelligence agencies

approach citizens and try to try to

influence them

and

once you know how they do it you can

spot it pretty easily

and i've got one now

that's that's trying to uh approach me

um

and i would say they they act very

different from normal people

i'm not going to tell you what they do i

don't want to tell you that but but it's

easy to spot

i can't tell you

all right

um

russia collusion was an insurrection i

think so and that would also explain oh

here's some more

over on locals people are posting all

kinds of pictures of

uh large devices that move containers

and so there are portable ones they

don't have to be cranes

all right

um

uh national guard has some national

guard have some container movers yeah i

imagine they would

all right

that is all i have to talk about today

uh if my energy was low

that's because that three hours of sleep

but

i hope we made the world a better place

and i hope

you're all a little bit more cautious

about imagining what you can do with

your own research

yes i know i am

if there's one place that you can uh

guarantee i will be humble

because i know some of you have a

problem with me being right too much

but where i guarantee you i'll always be

humble is that i can't do my own

research on any of this

i mean i can i can talk myself into

thinking i did it but i can't

so

i mean if you're substantially smarter

than me

in this particular way maybe you can

but uh i know i can't

so

unless you're pretty sure you're way

smarter than

than i am about how to analyze stuff

i don't think you can either not with

confidence anyway not with any

confidence

um

what kept me awake i

i hate sleep

so when i woke up i just didn't want to

be asleep again and then it doesn't

happen

i feel like sleep is just wasted

wasted life

but i will tell you i've been thinking

more and more about the the state of

what a dream is

have you ever have you ever said to

yourself the one way that you know this

is not a simulation

is that the stuff is solid

do you ever think to think that to

yourself

well i know

that whatever this is that i'm

experiencing my reality i know it can't

be

just code or pro program because they're

solids

right it doesn't go through it

you know if i were made of software

or some imaginary thing

none of this could happen right it

wouldn't be solid

but what about dreams

in your dreams everything's solid isn't

it

in your dreams things have weight

don't they

in your dreams there's still gravity

so apparently

we absolutely routinely pretty much most

of us every night

have an illusion in which there is full

weight

and gravity and all the rules of physics

sometimes you can fly in your dreams

sometimes

but

the question of whether you can imagine

solids when there are no solids it has

been answered

yeah you can it's called a dream that's

just one way you can do it

all right

which is different than virtual reality

because when you've got a virtual

reality goggles on you can't actually

feel any of the objects so that's that's

less than a dream a dream a dream you

have the sensation that objects have

weight

dreams are software updates

could be or defragmenting

it feels like defragging to me

so scott doesn't have spirituality i

guess it's all just a waste

is it

i have no physical sensation in youtube

well but the rules of physics apply in

your dreams

is what i'm saying

um

i learned your lesson about doing your

own research trying to figure out how to

do a live broadcast yeah

that that's that's a pretty humbling

thing

now some of you are going to say but

scott what about that

uh situation you gave us with the

spasmodic dysphonia and

googling your own

voice problem

that's an exception

and

one of the things that makes an

exception is that once i found it i

could verify it

so having having found it on my own

that i could easily take it to an expert

i could find an expert once i had a name

for it and then the expert could say oh

yeah you're right and then

you know my research just ends up being

the same as science you know i end up in

the same place so that's really a

special case

and i do think that that you that a

motivated person can do a slice

but i don't think we can evaluate

studies very well most of us

all right

that is all i have for today i believe

i'm babbling and i'm going to say

goodbye to you youtube

talk to you later