ht out there for your observation. It goes like this. In my opinion my life has been so close to what a video game should be like that I can't ignore it anymore. And one of the things that is very video game like goes like this. I have a theme my whole life starting when I was, I don't know, 10 years old. There's a theme in my life and I'm sorry I'm not going to tell you what it is but it's a theme. There's a specific problem that I have over and over and over again. Defeat, you know, going so far beyond what chance could possibly deliver.

Now you might say to yourself, Scott, Scott, everybody thinks everything that happens to them is a coincidence because in a way it is. Everything's a coincidence in a sense. Explain it away with all your rational thoughts, etc. And maybe you're completely right. But watch for the following pattern. Is there a theme in your life? Do you have a theme? Is there a specific, let's say a character flaw you have or a challenge that just over and over and over seems to apply to you but as far as you know it's just not happening to other people?

Now of all the problems that I could have, it's infinite, right? There are infinite problems that could just arise that I don't know are out there. Just anything could happen. But that doesn't happen. Instead my problems are clustered and have been since I was 11 years old. One right after another. And here's the freaky part. Each time I get a new challenge within my theme and I beat it seemingly against the odds, I beat it. As soon as it's beaten, within about no more than three days, usually two, a new problem that comes from nowhere will appear to replace the one that just got solved within the theme, you know, whatever your life theme is. And this just happened to me again. You know, it's happened to me countless times but I've started predicting. Try this. My belief is that the most accurate view of reality is the one that predicts. Several days ago I predicted out loud, privately but out loud, that I had just solved my last problem in the theme and that a new problem in the theme was going to come out of nowhere. And boy did it. Wow. Wow. Again, you know, you don't need to know the details of my little problems in life but I got the supernova of all problems solvable. You don't have to worry about me. I'm not gonna die or anything but oh my god. And I predicted it a few days before it happened. I predicted it.

So it's the predicting it that was the... now your guesses are amusing but you're not going to be able to guess it. And no that's not it. But watch. Watch this. Why are you all guessing the same thing? No it's, you're not going to be able to guess it. So I'm just laughing at your guesses. But the point is follow this in your own life and see if your problems follow a theme. And if they do, does the new problem appear as soon as the old one is gone? Because if it does you might be in a video game. You might be in a video game.

Here's another supposition. If you play a video game with say a friend, the two of you are inhabiting let's say different avatars and maybe the rest of the characters are NPCs, just robots. How can the two avatars that know each other in the outside world make sure they know each other in the inside world and they can tell the difference between a real player and an NPC? If we're a video game you probably would need to be able to tell the difference within the game so you know which ones are real. Have you ever noticed that there's some people that seem real in your life and there are others that are there but they don't seem real? In other words there's some connection that you never make with them. They're almost like scenery. But there are other people that you know from the first moment you see them, oh that's a real one. Come on, you're on the team. You know your teammate in the game. As soon as you see him you know that's my teammate. Sometimes it looks like love at first sight. Sometimes it's meeting a friend and you say there's some reason I met this forever. Like there's something about this friend that's not like the other things. There's just something about this person and your friends for life.

So I just put that out there. Nothing like a scientific proof but fun.

Here's an update on the ivermectin dust up. So I've accidentally created a little intellectual battle on Twitter between Brett Weinstein and Andres Backhouse. The topic is the effectiveness of ivermectin. And Brett recently did a very well done and well viewed video with a doctor, Dr. Kory was it, in which they talked about the many studies that show ivermectin is effective. But each individual study might be flawed or too small or have its issues. But if you do a meta-analysis of all of them it becomes clear that ivermectin is overwhelmingly useful against the COVID.

Now that all sounds very convincing. And as I said if you're just watching one point of view you walk away from that video saying, well that's pretty good. And I don't have anything to say about that. It all looks like it's backed by data. Smart people did smart things with the data and now they've got a conclusion. Why would I doubt it?

And then Andres Backhouse comes along whose expertise is economics and that gives you the ability to compare things and essentially be good at analyzing data and situations like that. And Andres points out that meta-analyses are not generally considered a gold standard. I'm paraphrasing here. He didn't use those words. But the point is that there are lots of smart people who would say some version of this. And one expert said exactly this in an article I just read. He said that if the signal is clear, in other words if you've got a bunch of different studies that aren't that great in their design but they all say clearly the same conclusion, let's say your study showed 100% success no matter what kind of study you did, well if every study you do showed 100% success no matter how poorly designed the study was, well probably it works, right? And you don't need a meta-analysis because you can just look at it and say, well it doesn't matter what we throw at it. Every single study, no matter how poorly designed, no matter what problems we put into it, is such a strong effect that you still see it. All right, when that's the case you