ou have an audience. If you have an audience and you might be persuading people one way or another, I feel like your digital communications is all penetrated by now, if not by my own country than by foreign intelligence people. I would think that somebody would want to blackmail me by now. Isn't it weird that I haven't? Well, you wouldn't know, I guess. I wouldn't admit it if I had been. But I haven't been blackmailed by anybody, strangely enough. And again, if I had, I suppose I'd lie about it.

All right. See, my laptop keeps dying here, and that makes me think that over on Locals, can you tell me if my feed just went dark when my computer timed out? And I don't think my computer should be timing out when I've got a live stream going. So Locals, see what you can do to make sure my screen doesn't go to screensaver.

As Adam Dopamine said today on Twitter — now Adam is a medical doctor, he's an MD — and he tweets that when you see 97 percent of doctors agreeing on whatever, that is meaningless. It's a lie of consensus. Now on some level you knew that, right? You knew that just because everybody agreed, that doesn't necessarily make it true. But let's take that to a deeper level. He says as an MD I can attest that the vast majority of doctors outside of universities do zero primary research. We know what we read in journals, learn at conferences, or hear on the lay news. So in other words, the doctors are basically getting their information the same way you are, and they don't have any special expertise to know if it's true.

So if there's one study and then the doctors read it, all the doctors will agree, and you'll say to yourself, well, all those doctors agree. But it doesn't mean anything because the doctors are just looking at the same thing you're looking at. Oh, there's a study. You looked at it and it said X works. The doctor looked at it and said X works, and he came to the same conclusion. The doctor added nothing. And if you don't know that, that all the doctors agree, it literally means nothing.

Let me take you back to — and I think Adam pointed this out — do you remember when we were told that 17 intelligence agencies agreed on what was it, on Russia collusion or something? Do you remember that there were 17 intelligence agencies agreed? Who was — and this will be a test of your memory — anybody who's been following me for a while, who was the only person in the country, I think the only public person, who was the only public person in the country who said as soon as I saw the 17 intelligence agencies that really means one? Who else immediately said no, 17 agencies means one. The other 16 didn't reproduce the work. They just looked at the one.

Something's happening. Noisy. There's some noise happening here. Right. So if you worked in a large organization, as I did, and you happened to be the author of the Dilbert comic, if you're the author of the Dilbert comic you know how bureaucracies work. That the agreement is just people agreeing with other people, right?

So I think I might have been the first to say it out loud. Yeah, a lot of people who were maybe not in the public eye were saying it privately. So I don't claim that nobody else thought of it, but I don't think anybody was dumb enough to say it out loud as soon as I did. So whenever you see that, just keep in mind that you're not talking about experts looking at experts. You're talking about people just like you looking at one expert.

Andreas Bachhouse weighed in on this and he said I had a tweet. I was recently reminded by a German MD that medicine as a study program doesn't aim at qualifying for scientific medical research, meaning that if you study to be a doctor you have not learned how to do medical research, and therefore you haven't learned how to read it either. So you can get through the program, says Andreas, without having read a single paper or having analyzed data. You can become a doctor without ever looking at