ll right, now here is the other thing that got people worked up. So people complained that I was trying to limit their freedom to, you know, the freedom to just go back to work even if there was some impact on other people. They claimed that as their freedom. Now I do not disagree with that by the way. We will get to my opinion here. But I do not disagree with that. That would be exactly a description of freedom. Yeah, freedom would be you can go to work even if there is some negative effects.

But what I did find is that I thought I would help clarify people’s thinking about this freedom thing. And that is where things got bad. And I said you should be thinking in terms of three levels of freedom. The not having freedom is what we have now. So right now we do not have freedom because the government says stay home and it feels like there would be penalties if we disobey that. So right now that is no freedom.

But people mistakenly think that freedom would be the ability for anybody who wants to to go to work. Well anybody who does not like that risk does not have to. They can go to work or they can stay home and then everybody has freedom. To which I say no, that is incorrect analysis. That is only half freedom. If you want to get to actual freedom you have to let your neighbor kill you if he does not want to take the risk of you going to work. That is freedom.

So you have to get rid of all of the rules and all of the penalties for a bad action. So if you are keeping some penalties because these actions will have a bad impact on other people such as, you know, wear your seatbelt it will keep the healthcare costs and insurance down for everybody. So I was just trying to be helpful in my provocative way by saying you are not advocating for freedom. You are advocating for just another type of limited freedom.

And I will bet you that every person who said you cannot take my freedom away if I want to go to work, it does not matter even if it has a bad effect on other people, how many of the people with that argument do you think have driver’s licenses? Because what is a driver’s license? That is the government telling you you can or cannot drive. And the only way you can is if you have demonstrated to the government that there is a good chance you can keep other people at least a little bit safe because you know how to drive and you are wearing glasses and you have met the minimum requirements of a driver.

So we do not live in a world in which we are not continuously trading off our privacy and our freedom to get benefits. In fact the entire — well this is an exaggeration but a big part of what the government does and why you have it is to make exactly those decisions of saying all right, you really want this to work better but unfortunately the only way this is going to work better is if I take a little bit of this freedom away from you and maybe this privacy too. Are you okay with that?

Now sometimes we get asked and sometimes we do not. But the point is everything we see in government is this process of weighing the benefit of losing a little freedom with the positive that could come from that. With full exposure and visibility we all know what we are arguing about. We all know that is the trade-off.

So for those people who think that they should have the freedom — and by the way I still have not given you my opinion. If you think you have heard my opinion you have not. I am simply describing the field. And so the people who say yes I should be able to go to work because I feel the risks are low to me and I also do not think the risks are that high to other people relative to other risks so I think I should be allowed to go to work.

Now here is what might surprise you. That is a reasonable argument. That is completely reasonable. That is a body who said all right I am looking at all the pluses and minuses and I know that a lot of people would die under this plan but all things considered I think we are better off this way. At least the people who do not die are better off than the people who know how loved ones died. Beuller, better off. So that is a completely reasonable opinion.

And people, I think people believe that I was fighting against that. I would say I am still evaluating so I have not come down on that or the opposite. I feel like I would need to know a lot more. Just like the crisis team needs to know.

Here is my question for those people who have that opinion. What is your assumption about what happens to the healthcare system? Because you know I would like to have healthcare at the moment. I do not really have a healthcare system, you know what I mean? Because I have got two operations that were scheduled. There is one that was going to be scheduled. But do I have healthcare? I pay for healthcare. The reason I cannot have healthcare is because these people want to exercise their freedom to go to work in the future. So hypothetically.

So if the government said well we are out of it, you are right, just operate responsibly. You are responsible people. Act like adults. Do what you can. And so people go to work because they think the risks are worth it to them and to the damage of other people they go to work. What do they think happens to the hospitals?

Somebody says BS. Yeah that is a block. So I am gonna block the people who are just not even willing to think about all the variables. So at least let me finish.

All right, somebody said the hospitals are empty. That might be the least aware comment of the day. Let me explain for the billionth time. I do not know. You could be watching the news and not be aware of this. Most of the hospitals are empty because they were getting ready for the push and they cancelled all the people like me with two operations upcoming. And so they are intentionally empty so that they can be ready just in case. So you should think of that as like insurance. It is not a mistake to get ready just in case. It is not a permanent state. It does not tell you anything about where the virus is going. It just tells you that at the moment they are ready. That is all it tells you.

Either should there is no other information you should get from that. But if you look at New York City and Italy and some other places I think we are beyond arguing whether it would have an impact on your healthcare.

So do other people have the freedom or should they have the freedom in this country to go to work if the probable impact — let us say that they just do it with no restrictions. They just want full freedom. I just want to go to work. If the probable outcome of that is that healthcare is unavailable to me, is that okay? No it might be. Because remember almost everything we do has an impact on other people. If I drive my car I might kill you with my car. So can I drive a car? Well here is the thing that people argue. Here is the thing. Society has decided that the risk with cars is acceptable and we have a healthcare system that can handle that. Society has decided that some people smoking cigarettes, while not ideal, is acceptable and our healthcare system is sized to handle that. They have decided that you can do your extreme sports and our healthcare system is sized to handle that. In fact you can drink your alcohol. Our healthcare system is sized to handle it.

So if you are comparing going to work and knowing that you are going to spread the virus and according to every expert would overload at least some of our metropolitan cities, that is not the same. We are not sized to handle it. If we were sized to handle it your argument would be far stronger.

Somebody says New York City is not the USA but it would be according to all the experts. Now I am not going to overrule the experts. I am just gonna say I do not believe there is anybody who has a virologist in their title who does not think this would sweep through the country if we did not mitigate. Can somebody fact check that? Is there anybody who is an actual professional who is in this biology field who has come out and said in public you could just not mitigate, just do not do anything and we will be fine? Or do they all think it will turn into some version of New York at some rate? Yeah it just might not be overnight.

All right so fact check me on that but I feel like I am pretty firm there.

So there was so much loser think in my — let me call out these specific loser thinks. So a lot of people are doing the one variable thinking. They are just thinking about my freedom. Freedom is absolute. My freedom. And they are forgetting about all the other variables like okay there is a reason to get a driver’s license. It is to protect the other people. All right. It is not about one variable.

So one variable thinking. The chapter in my book *Loserthink*. They also compare it to the wrong things. I gave you the example they are comparing it to driving. It is a bad comparison because driving accidents do not overwhelm our hospital systems. They use the slippery slope argument that if you do this anything you do voluntarily, well if it is a good idea it is going to become the law. I have got a whole chapter on why this slippery slope does not make sense. Now there are things that do progress and I would certainly admit that if you had a voluntary app that was so good that the government said you know it is so good we are just gonna make that mandatory. Of course that could happen but it would happen because it is a good idea. It is not a slippery slope to move in a direction of better ideas. So you know I agree that you could slip toward bad ideas as well but we generally do not. We do not slip there. We make decisions. We go there willingly.

And then of course there is a failure of imagination and a mind-reading element where people kept accusing me of really having a sinister plan for a tyrannical dictatorship. Like that was my secret plan and that is the reason I was suggesting some ideas. It was all really to soften you up sort of like the CIA is doing. And that they thought of softening you up for the totally and totalitarian takeover of all your rights and your privacy.

Weirdly, and maybe somebody can answer this for me, weirdly something like 60 to 70 percent of all the people who complained in a specific way also had icons that were black and white designs. Yeah they were black and white. Now are there that many black and white icons for your profile? There are not that many that are black and white but why is that that about 70 percent of the people who were arguing for an absolute freedom no matter the cost, why is it that 70 percent of them had black and white but different designs? The black and white, does that mean something? Is there some kind of belief system in which that is a style? Is it Q? Somebody said Q and they could be that because I was wondering if there is — your avatar. Yeah so people’s avatars were not even black and white people necessarily. They were just designs.

So here is why I am asking. If they are Chinese agents, if you are China what would be one of the most damaging things you could do to the United States? I will answer the question. The most damaging thing you could do to the United States would be get on social media, pretend to be real people, that argue that the most important thing and the only thing we should be looking at is our freedom to go back to work. Because that is going to basically cause us to rage with virus while China will lie and say ours is under control. Look we have zero again today.

So China would like to pretend that they got everything under control with their system. Hey that Chinese Communist system, look what we did. Yeah got that under control. How you doing with your freedoms over there? Yeah how about your freedom? Did your Constitution work out for you? Oh a million people died. Oh so sorry. Can we ship you some defective masks and gowns? Would you be happy? Can I steal your IP? Can I send you some fentanyl?

So I am not gonna say that all of the people who were coming at me today — a lot of them they came in. I was a wave. They seemed to all come at once and they seemed to have very similar arguments. Those similar arguments are identical to what I would do if I were the Chinese government and I really wanted to mess with this country bad. And you know they do because they are doing it. I mean it is not like I am guessing. We have caught them doing it exactly the way I am describing it.

So are these Americans who have six levels of loser think? Meaning their mind-reading, failure of imagination, slippery slopes are real, comparing the wrong variables, one variable thinking. That is a lot of bad thinking for one person, right? Is not that a lot of thinking mistakes for one real person? Because my observation is that real people can have one or two, sometimes three. Have you ever seen a real person have six simultaneous glaring obvious elements of loser think in one opinion?

I do not know if these are real people folks. So let me just say this. If it turns out they are all real people and they are just Q followers or something I totally would not believe that. So I am not coming down on the opinion that these are definitely Chinese agents but their opinions are identical. I will die on that hill. I die on the hill that the worst thing that China could do is try to get us to ignore the health concerns of others and just go to work without any restrictions. That would be their most clever plan. If they are not doing that they are not as smart as we think because that is what I would do. What would you do? What would you do seriously? What would you do? Right.

And they might even be playing both sides. I mean they might have the trolls that are arguing we should stay locked up forever because that is bad for the economy. Trolls that are arguing we should just go out and have a civil war or get our rights back because the conflict is good too. You know China wins both ways.

All right now let us talk about something happier which is the economy. And this is kind of fun. So this is the thing I wanted to leave you with. You know I am gonna start weird. Have you ever noticed how similar a virus is to an idea? In both cases an idea or a virus, they are things that use humans as hosts. They cause a physical change in you. In other words in order to store an idea in your head it is associated with a physical and chemical change in your brain. If that physical and chemical change went away then so would the idea. And likewise a virus becomes part of you. It was incorporated with you for at least for a while. And then both of these can spread by contact.

Now I will get to a point. It is really worth it. You are gonna love it. So among our ideas, and this is just some samples, by no means complete, are the ideas our Constitution is important, capitalism, entrepreneurship, risk management, science, engineering, and even optimism. These are all ideas that we hold as important and they have been developed over centuries and eons. And these are the ideas that basically keep us working well.

Now at the moment we are compatible with most of our ideas meaning that the human species which are the hosts work well with the ideas. So if the ideas succeed well they can only do it because our physical bodies and brains, you know we are also reproducing and succeeding.

I think the best way to look at this is that it is not humans against virus. Rather our ideas, which you can almost think of as separate entities, that the ideas are in a war with the viruses and the humans are nothing but the battlefield. We are nothing but the battlefield. Because humans are humans we think that we are the players. We think we are the central characters but we are not. We are the canvas. We are not the painting. We are just the battlefield.

The raging battle is between the ideas which if you watch them, the ideas have almost automatically with the help of the people as their hosts, the ideas have immediately emerged. Hey here is a bunch of ideas. We are fighting the virus. Then the ideas started combining and getting stronger and evolving. Did you see how many ideas sprung out of this crisis? It was like an idea volcano. Just as soon as the host was threatened the ideas sensed the threat because if the host dies the ideas die with it. And so the ideas using the humans as their base just sort of forming and fomenting and just formed this furious amount of energy. And every part of our society or our life was reimagined.

So the ideas went into full battle mode immediately and it changed everything. It just put their host on shutdown. The hosts are saying we want to go back to work and the ideas are saying not yet.

Now these ideas collectively form the economy because it is these ideas that cause us to be motivated. We work with arms and legs. We buy things. We trade things. And then there is a whole bunch of physical stuff, you know the buildings, the jobs, the products, the machines. But those all start with ideas and the ideas motivate our bodies and then we build these things. So the economy is mostly a bunch of ideas. That is the important part.

But keep in mind if you blew up all of this stuff, let us say there is a world war and a lot of stuff gets destroyed, as long as the ideas are intact and we are not dead we could probably figure out a way to get back to a good economy such as after World War II. But what if it goes the other way? What if we lost all of our ideas but we still had our products and our tools and our buildings? We are all dead because it is the ideas that matter. These are the important things. The physical manifestations of them are also important but those can all be changed. If you mess with this stuff everything breaks, right?

So this stuff immediately just started super evolving. When we are done with this our ideas will have risen to a new level of being if you will. It is almost like they just went into rapid evolution and improved and merged and combined into this wondrous thing.

All right so here is the first bit of optimism. You cannot kill this. You would have to kill all of us. Yeah if there is three of us left over you know we are gonna reassemble right because the ideas just need a host and then they will build back your economy and everything. So the first good news is the strongest part of the war is in really good shape. The ideas rose to the challenge and it looks like they are gonna get it done.

But there will be some technical problems with the economy and I would just call out these three. Of course you could make a really long list of all the problems but primarily there is going to be credit problems where people did not pay their bills and then loans cannot pay off their debts. Banks might be in trouble. You have got a demand problem where yeah we got products but nobody has money to buy them. Where is my demand?

And then of course food. I think food will be solved because we are a compassionate country and we are not gonna run out of supplies. That seems, you know, we will run out of maybe choices but we are not gonna run out of food. And if people do not have money to buy the food well as I said on my earlier Periscope nobody in my neighborhood is gonna ge