Episode 924 Scott Adams: Learn the User Interface For Reality
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
154.61856
Summary
Bill Maher's interview with Dan Crenshaw may have been the first time he learned that there's another curtain behind the curtain, and that it's a whole bunch of stuff that might make sense to him.
Transcript
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hey everybody come on in we got some stuff to talk about good stuff fun fun stuff things
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will blow your mind possibly delight you possibly blow your mind and then delight you
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but it's all happening here oh i don't know if it's morning or evening i'm gonna put down
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my shades though let's see if i look more handsome when there's less light on me because i think i do
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if you know what i mean all right let's get to it yeah let's get to it christina nice of you to join
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so i was watching the interview with uh bill maher did with dan crenshaw you know dan crenshaw
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and if you know who dan crenshaw is you know that he's one of the probably one of the better
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communicators on the uh on the right probably one in the top probably the top five or so you know
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you put him in there with matt gates and i don't uh a few other people um darker please
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so less light much less light would be much better anyway so if you watch the interview
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it was going around the internet and people were saying that crenshaw dismantled bill maher and
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everything but here's what i saw now of course i can't read minds but here's a some speculation
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and you can decide how close this sounds to you doesn't it seem reasonable to you
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that bill maher probably hears a lot of arguments that agree with the left probably hears them all
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the time but i'll bet he doesn't hear many good arguments from the right he probably he probably
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hears the the one pundit that cnn allows to be on their air every you know 10 minutes or every you
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know 10 days or something and you know he probably samples a little bit of the stuff the clips and
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the quotes taken out of context and stuff but i'll bet i'll bet bill maher and this is just speculation
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through no fault of his own probably has a gigantic blind spot for what the good argument is on the
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right i've noticed this a few times it doesn't ever seem as though bill maher is disagreeing with the
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best arguments on the right but of course he's disagreeing with the the dumb ones that don't make
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any sense and what the reason i'm somewhat uh more fascinated with bill maher is i've been watching for
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years and i know that he's capable of changing his mind under any circumstances so long as there's a
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good argument you know and there's some data so if you've watched him forever you know that he's
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you know for people on both the left and the right he can be maddeningly frustrating because he doesn't
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just automatically agree with one team and so people you know everybody finds some reason to be mad at
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one thing or another so here's what i saw and i think that bill maher got a little flavor of this when
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i was on his show back in 2016 i guess and it goes like this i think that when dan crenshaw started
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talking it looked like you could see in bill's face that he was learning for the first time
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that there's another curtain behind the curtain in other words you know somebody as you know tuned in
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as bill maher can not only see the show that everybody sees you know the one that's in public
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but he's he's one of the few people who can look behind the curtain and i think he thought that if he
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could see the show and that he could also look behind the curtain that's all there is to see and i feel
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as if what i was watching and again this requires a lot of speculation and assumption on my part but it felt
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like what i was seeing uh was that bill maher was learning from dan crenshaw's better communicating
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that there was a curtain behind the curtain and there might be a whole bunch of stuff
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who knows how big might be a little might be a lot but it was it was like bill was for the first time
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hearing something that made sense that was coming from the other team and i think it made him think
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is there something here now if had been anybody else they would just be dismissing it because it's
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just team sport but what makes somebody like a bill maher and i would say sam harris would be in the
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same category even if you don't agree i think he is of people who can change their mind they just
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have to hear a better argument and see facts that support it so that was fascinating a lot of people
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asked me for the last few weeks to talk about dr shiva's ideas on treating coronavirus and i hadn't
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really looked into them until today so i have so i have a preliminary opinion a preliminary opinion
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my preliminary opinion is that in in essence what he's promoting or not promoting you know he doesn't
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have any money in it as far as i know but what he's uh recommending is that some kind of a intensive
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vitamin treatment with specific vitamins i think a and d and c um would make a big difference in the
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coronavirus treating it now here's the thing i have to give you some background some of you know years
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ago i tried to start a food company making this burrito product that i tried to stuff with all the
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vitamins and minerals you would need for the whole day and i thought wouldn't that be great you could
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eat a delicious burrito and make sure you got all your vitamins and minerals so even if the rest of the
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day didn't go well you'd be set and in that process what i learned is that the science of nutrition
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is uh is largely made up it's just all just garbage and the the science of uh of vitamins and minerals
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is extra garbage so part of the reason that i ended up bailing out is that uh i couldn't i couldn't make
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a product with a claim that hey it's got these vitamins and minerals if all the science was
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evaporating behind me you know when i started it i thought the science was pretty solid but it was
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honestly just an assumption i just assumed we knew that vitamins are good for you right didn't you assume
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that science knows if vitamins are good for you and which ones and how much there's no such thing
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the the science of vitamins is largely just uh ridiculousness now i'm not saying that vitamins have
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no no value obviously you need your vitamin c so you don't get scurvy vitamin d probably does have
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all kinds of benefits etc so some of the basics we certainly know um but beyond the basics it's just
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the wild west so i may be biased by the fact that i i spend time in this domain of vitamins and what i
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found is that it was all charlatans and garbage that that was my experience now does that mean that the
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next thing that comes up is untrue because all the last stuff was it doesn't it doesn't mean that at
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all so i'm so i'm confessing my bias so hear this part really clearly my bias is that when i hear oh a
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a remarkable sounding claim involving ordinary vitamins even at high dosages or even if they're
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intravenous but if i hear something that's an extraordinary claim about vitamins i just assume
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it's not true okay so that's my starting point let me give you a analogy to make my point
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if you get an email from a nigerian prince who says he can get his money back from a bank
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if you help him out do you need to know if that's real do you need to research it do you need to ask
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for identification no you don't because it's an email from a nigerian prince that whole category
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is very unlikely ever to produce a real one might i might i mean i can't say there will never ever be a
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nigerian prince who is in really got some trouble and you could help him if you just return his email
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i'm not saying it's impossible i'm just saying i've never seen it so if so if somebody tomorrow says
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hey hey i i know these have mostly been not true but have you seen this email it's from a nigerian
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prince and i don't know i know i know you what you're saying that all those other ones were not
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real but i feel good about this one so analogies of course are imperfect and therefore it's one of
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the reasons that they never persuade anybody and i'm sure i didn't persuade you with that one
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the point is i'm that i'm biased the point is not that you should believe it's real or not
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real based on that story the point is i'm biased and so when i see a remarkable claim
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that has this form it's very remarkable and suspiciously the medical community is ignoring
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this claim and or is unfamiliar with it so if it's a remarkable claim about vitamins
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and the other claim is that the medical community is missing this obvious thing
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it's sort of in the category of things that are never true but again this could be the one time
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maybe it is so i tweeted it out uh dr shiva had some um exchanges with somebody i tweeted it out
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because it had links and description of what he was talking about and asked any experts
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to give me an opinion whether it looked real now if some experts come in and say scott scott scott
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he's on to something well i'm open to changing my mind i can definitely change my mind i would just
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have to hear somebody smart say oh yeah yeah i get it all the other nigerian princes were fake
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well honestly this one looks pretty good if somebody says that i'll reconsider but so the question is out
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so um now i saw in the comments somebody said you should debate dr shiva
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are you kidding are you kidding what good would that do me debating dr shiva let me let me do the
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debate for you so that you don't have to sit through it i will now act out me debating dr shiva on this
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blah blah something i don't understand meaning scott doesn't understand uh and uh vitamins and and stuff
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and science and uh i have multiple degrees from mit and then it's my turn to debate and i say
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i you know i didn't understand any of that honestly i don't know where do we go from here
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because i don't even know what those words mean
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do you have a book or something i can read to learn about this microbiology stuff and
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you know immunology and virology and statistics i if i do a little studying
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i'll do a little studying and then we can have this debate again but at the moment
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i don't know any of those words mean so we're not getting anywhere you see that it would be no
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point in debate right because i would say it's my bias that these things are usually not true
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and then what would he say well i can see why you would have that bias based on your experience
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right that's that's sort of the beginning of the end of the debate because i think dr shiva
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would say well of course you've just admitted that you have a bias i can i can see the reason you
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would have a bias your experience of course you have a bias that way that's it that's that's the
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whole debate we're done now because i don't understand his points that's why i asked for somebody else to
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explain it to me all right um i think what triggered me is that uh in dr shiva's tweet he made an
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assumption about bill gates's uh motives bill gates internal thoughts and if you pair uh something
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that looks sketchy just by its nature even if it's not it just looks sketchy because of its nature
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and you add that to conspicuous public mind reading well that does not help your credibility
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because it seemed like that was important that it would require knowing what bill gates was thinking
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and that what he was thinking was he was trying to make money with vaccines or something
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so somebody sent me a link to politifact where they fact checked all the wild bill gates rumors
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now my version of debunking the wild bill gates rumors mine goes like this and maybe you've heard
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this argument before blah blah blah bill gates wants to depopulate the world
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here's my argument you know all those nigerian prince emails that's the end of my argument
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because it's just such such a ridiculous claim i'm not going to spend one second
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googling whether bill gates ever said he wants to depopulate the world do you know why because if you
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ever thought that was true there's something wrong with your brain all right this is not something
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you google to find out maybe he said he wants to depopulate the world he didn't say he wants to
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depopulate the world and you know i checked politifact and of course that never happened what was the
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other one the other one was some horrible thing with vaccines in india and i actually thought that
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one could have been true it's just that even if it had been true it just would have been an example
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of a drug trial that didn't go well it wouldn't mean anybody was evil or had bad intentions that's
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the whole point of the drug trial but it turns out it wasn't even true so so that whole india vaccine
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thing was just all made up just bs so uh i tweeted that if you want to go follow the links so you can
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convince yourself so if any of you thought that the bill gates stuff was true you really should have asked
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me uh i tweeted some uh restaurant reopening ideas which i would like to share with you for those of
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you who don't see it so here's the starting point you know one of one of the creative mistakes we make
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is to say hey let's what can we do to get our restaurants back to where um you always fall for hoaxes
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block not true um so so people think hey how do we get our restaurants back to the way they were
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and i say if the restaurant model is just blown up you should not be asking this question you should
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you should not be asking how to get restaurants back to the way they were because you rarely get a
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chance to blow everything up and you know just rethink it from the scratch and so i think you
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should be asking how could we make restaurants better than they ever were because you should at
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least ask the question i mean it might turn out that the answer is you can't do it but if the only
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question you're asking is how do we get back to way to the way we were that's sort of a loser mindset
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because when do you get to have stuff blown up like this i mean it's all bad news
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but on the other hand you kind of get to start from scratch and really get creative and be flexible
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maybe there's some local ordinances that can be you know adjusted a little bit that normally wouldn't
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be possible so here's some things i want to suggest in that realm suppose doordash or any of the apps
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that let you order food to be picked up at restaurants suppose it added an option for dining in
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and instead of where you put in your address of your house you put in your table number so if you're
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ordering from a certain restaurant you put in the table number that means you're there and so there's
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no server talking to you to get your order you just order by app when you're in the restaurant
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and then it comes over and it's sat on a side table so that nobody nobody puts it in front of each of
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you there's nobody taking dishes away they just put a side table there and you help yourself so that
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you're not interacting now of course in the long run is especially a high-end restaurant you want
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the full table service but at the moment you might have to get flexible i also thought that you could
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add a little tent card a little you know a sign that's on the table that has the phone numbers to
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text if you want to send a message to the to the kitchen you know it's not the chef who answers the
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phone but if you want to send a message to the kitchen or the front office or the server or
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something you just text it and uh there would be somebody whose job it is just to take the text and
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tell whoever it is that needs to be told so that's one way you could avoid human contact you might also
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want to relax local zoning laws so you could expand sidewalks out during warm weather and just maybe
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close the streets uh you know for a while for months just close any streets that have a lot of
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restaurants on them because usually there's not much parking on the street anyway you don't lose that
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much and usually there's an easier way to get around than the street that has all the restaurants so
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just close it let the restaurants expand into the street so you got lots of space around tables
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and maybe even allow dogs in my town you can't bring your dog to a restaurant even if you're eating
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outside but what if you could at least temporarily wouldn't you like to bring your dog out to dinner
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and you have them on the leash of course a lot of people would like that at least in my town that
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would be a big thing um and you could also imagine that using the honor system because you could never
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enforce this you would ask people to come in only in the at least in the beginning with the people that
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they're isolating with so if you're isolating with your family you can bring your family and send
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them to table at a restaurant but you don't want to mix people who had been separately isolating just
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because they went to a restaurant later you could do that and maybe maybe if it's a business meeting and
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you just have to have people cross pollinating you have some special places you know away from other
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people something like that but the larger idea is just to rethink these things from scratch
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and rather than say how did we get back to where we were think about how to make it better
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all right i promised you that i would give you the user interface for reality and i'm working on a book
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idea i don't know if i'll write it or not but it has to do with filters and i was trying to think of all the
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different filters that one can put on life and i've argued that if you have experience in enough
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domains you can look through more windows or another way to say that is you more you have more filters
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by which to understand the world and i would contend this is not yet a complete list and i might end up
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combining some categories a little bit but let's say this is about 90 right i contend that these are the
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filters that if you learned enough about these and you wouldn't have to be an expert on any of these
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things but if you learned you know logic and religion if you mating let me explain that one as a filter
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bad person goes away all right that's always satisfying did soros hire you
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um so mating is the idea that you could see the world through the lens that everything we do
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is to show off to get a mate even if you have a mate we're just sort of automatically designed
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for mating so if you see the world through that lens you can really understand a lot of a lot of the
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world uh you should know a little bit about statistics and science persuasion economics
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the simulation theory that we might be a simulation
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there's also a strategy way to look at the world uh there's an abundance mindset
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you're finding a way that everybody gets something
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and then the moist robot idea which might be redundant
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but that you could do things which would not seem possible
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but they don't seem to be mad at us at the moment