his is going to head, right? So I had a little bit of, I won't call it disagreement. I was confused at what Carl Bergstrom was saying on Twitter. Seems like a real well-informed, smart guy. And he was doing a real good job of explaining stuff. He was explaining specifically that the purpose behind flattening the curve, and his point was that the purpose is not just to keep people out of the hospitals, which is important, but then also by flattening the curve you would in the end infect fewer people.

And you know, of course I raised my hand on Twitter and said, okay, but doesn't what you said support that? Because I was just looking at his thread and his graphs, and I said it doesn't support that. What you've so far presented simply says it would be spread out, but I don't see the argument for why it would ever be less in the long run. We would still reach herd immunity one way or another. And we had a few iterations, and I still said, but I'm not seeing any kind of description of what would cause the flattened graph ever to drop off. Because if it doesn't drop off, then it just keeps going flat until you get to the same amount as if it had been a peak.

Now I'm just asking from the point of ignorance. I'm not yet disagreeing with anything. I'm trying to understand. So yeah, I guess he was doing something else today besides talking to me. So he said that he had to run. So we didn't quite finish this, but he did leave me with this provocative thought, which could be true. So let's say there's a good chance that what he's saying might be true. And here's the argument. Still missing some reasons in it, but at least here it is: that if you do the unmitigated peak and you just let it peak, that you will get to herd immunity same as if you had a flattened curve that would just take longer. But if you let the peak happen, you will go past herd immunity. In other words, if you creep up to herd immunity, maybe you can sort of hit it wherever that number is, sixty percent of people having it. But if you don't creep up on it, you're going to overshoot the mark because it'll just be so vicious that just too many people get it before herd immunity even gets to be a thing.

To which I said, okay, I will accept that people say that, but I still don't see why. And then I ask this question which is still hanging out there. I haven't got an answer. I said I can see why that might be a thing with a quick-killing, fast-moving virus. If it's moving fast and it's killing people fast, I could see how that would make sense, that having a spike could get you past herd immunity and then too many people died. But I said with the coronavirus, since you can be asymptomatic for you know a week or two, wouldn't even if you got all the infections in the United States to zero, all it would take is one traveler to come in and my town would be infected before anybody even got a test? So I said in the very specific case of the coronavirus where you can be asymptomatic for a long time, how do you ever not get to the same herd immunity?

But there could be something to this thought that if you get to it quickly and just all at once, you can shoot past it. But I've not yet seen the argument for it.

But there's a punch line to all this. And here's the punch line. So after a few of my ignorant non-scientist questions, Professor Bergstrom left me with this thought. He said, Scott, it's entirely possible that thousands of infectious disease epidemiologists are mistaken or lying, or maybe your intuitions are wrong. So he sets it up as is my ignorant cartoonist intuition, which he says hey could be right, and maybe thousands of infectious disease epidemiologists who agree with him, maybe they're all wrong. Which I thought was a pretty good line under normal circumstances, right? Good line, right?

Here's what I said. I said, well, it wouldn't be the first time this year I was more right about this virus than nearly every health professional in the world. It would be the third time. Because it would be the third time my intuition was better than what did he say, thousands of infectious disease epidemiologists? Yes, yes. My intuition was better in public than thousands of epidemiologists. I told you the masks would help when they said it wouldn't. Fact-check me if I'm wrong. And now they all agree with me. I told you that we should shut the airports on January 24th when the experts said not yet. Who was right? My instinct or thousands of infectious disease epidemiologists? And the answer is my instinct.

So Professor Bergstrom, he seems well informed and smart, and I hope he gets back to me because I think he has something there. I just think that he had some maybe some assumptions that he may have assumed other people assumed, and so I was a little bit in the dark about that. But I appreciate him working with me. I just think it's funny that even at this point people would still doubt my intuition over their thousands of experts. What's wrong with them, I say.

All right. Let's see. So remember I taught you how to spot fake news. And one of the ways that you do it is you look for a story that's a little too perfect because it fits a political narrative. And then secondly, fake news is when you think you can read minds. Okay, so it turns out we have this story about Ahmaud Arbery, a young African-American guy, twenty-five, ex-military I think he was. The story is, I'll just say the story is because I wasn't there, that he was just jogging in a Brunswick, Georgia neighborhood. And that there were two, and this is Twitter's explanation, two white supremacists chased him down and shot him.

Now I have many comments about this. Number one, the story from the people who did the shooting is that he looked like somebody who had been burglarizing some homes that they'd seen on a video from before. And they were just trying to talk to him and he was running away. And they wanted to talk to him, but they had guns. And if you look at the video, there's a video of the actual event. I don't know if people see the video differently, but what I saw was I saw Arbery attacking the guy with a gun. I did not see the guy with the gun shoot first or attack the other guy, the person who died. I only saw the person who died attack the person with the gun and run right at him and not let go while the guy with the gun had the gun in his chest. Like the gun was actually pointed at the guy's torso while the guy was still fighting with the guy.

Now I'm no hand-to-hand expert. I have not battled experts. I have never been in the military. But I don't know, if somebody's pointing a gun at me and they just want to ask me a question, I'm not going to try to take that gun out of their hands because I would be afraid I would get shot.

Now I think I have to insert at this point of the story, to keep me employed and out of jail and stuff, I'll have to insert this. This will be the part that people take out when they