I want to. But of course that's shortsighted because it's not just your risk. You're filling up an ICU. You're causing problems for people who love you. You're using up resources, etc.

And so I've decided that the most, let's say, defensible, morally defensible thing that I can do is to suck it up because what you don't need is for me to be sick, right? Don't you want that ICU bed to be available? Don't you want to not lose Coffee with Scott Adams? Don't you want to make sure the resources don't get sucked up? Don't you want to make sure I don't infect a frontline healthcare worker? You want that, right?

My personal responsibility as a person who's in that vulnerable class, albeit at the low end. I'm not highly vulnerable. I'm sure I'd be fine as well, but I'm in the vulnerable class. So here's my commitment to you. I'm going to be extra, extra cautious. And the only reason I'm going to be extra cautious is really for your benefit because I'm in the dangerous class.

Now, at the same time, I don't care if you're not. Now, can that be consistent? Is it consistent for me to say I'm personally going to take more precaution because I don't want you to have to deal with me being sick? But at the same time, I think I can be consistent by saying if you're just, pick a number, if you're 25, I don't care what you do. I just don't care. You could take some extra risks if you want to because I'm going to be taking some extra precautions. So I'm hoping my extra precautions will compensate for your maybe a little extra risky behavior. It's going to happen anyway. It's not like it's up to me. It's just going to happen anyway.

So I'm just interested how you process this. I would like to see a little extra caution on the vulnerable and maybe a little looser on everybody else so that we can have a real life.

One of the things that we consistently do wrong as a civilization is that we tend to bucketize our topics because it's hard to talk about things until you can put them in categories. But this ends up fooling us because we imagine that the category that we put something into just to make it easy to talk about it, we think it's meaningful. But usually it's just a way to talk about it.

Now let me give you an example. If I said to you there's a decision about COVID health but then the other variable is the economy and how the economy also translates through to health. You need a good economy to have good health. So we started out with people saying hey you're focusing too much on just the direct observable healthcare problem and you're not focusing enough on this other variable which is the economy which also affects your healthcare.

Now I feel as if collectively the minds of the world have indeed shifted so that now most of us I think are now capable of saying oh yeah I get it. You can die in two different ways. The economy could be bad or the virus gets you. So you have to have a smart balance of those things to get the right result.

What's being left out? So now you've done a good job. You said, "Oh, wait. My buckets, my healthcare bucket is not really separate from my economy bucket." It's just that we put them in buckets because then you've got an economist who looks at the economy. You've got doctors looking at the healthcare. It makes things easier, but it can mislead you because these are not separate buckets. It's closer to being one bucket, but it's just easier to talk about it as two because of the way we separate our experts, right?

But what's missing? That's two big variables, economy and healthcare. What's missing? And this will be your test for a blind spot. In the comments, tell me what topic which is as big as those. It's as big as a pandemic. It's bigger actually. It's bigger than a pandemic and it's at least as big as the economy in importance.

Somebody says freedom. That is a correct answer but not the one I'm looking for. All right. The freedom question is a little trickier. So that's not what I'm going for. But you're correct, right? So I'll give you full credit for the answer, but it's not where I'm trying to take you.

There we go. Boom. Somebody got the right answer. Look at all the people who answered and only one person got the right answer. Military safety, homeland security. Why? Because you can't have a military without a strong economy. And even if you imagined that your economy still existed but it took a hit, let's say your economy goes down 20%. Will your military be as ready? Not a chance. Not a chance because most of your money has to go toward keeping people alive in the short run. Your military is a little bit of a luxury and that's where your last dollar goes to that. It's like, well, I got to do this too.

You would imagine it could be your top priority, but living today is going to be your top priority. So here's the thing. If you imagine that the military questions are this separate bucket, then you can ignore it, right? Just ignore it. That's another bucket. We're not even talking about that. I'm talking about coronavirus. That's the bucket I'm talking about.

But if you don't look at this problem as a healthcare plus economy plus homeland defense, military essentially, you've missed one third of the decision. You know, I'm speaking in very rough terms. They're not really one third, but a gigantic part of this decision is what are you doing to your homeland defense, right?

What if China gets, let's say, a big gain and it catches up to us economically? What would that do to your military preparedness? If China pulls to parity with economy, you're in trouble, right? The military is almost perfectly correlated with the strength of your economy.

You want to go a little bit further? Let me go a little bit further. We're looking at the climate. When you look at the climate, of course, we made the mistake of saying, "Hey, this climate could be dangerous and kill people, etc." But at least we're smart enough to say, "Oh, but there's also this economic part. It's not just about that you would be dangerously at risk healthwise if global warming is what the scientists are telling you."

What's missing? What's missing once again is your military. Can you have a strong homeland security and a strong military in this day and age if you don't have energy independence and if it isn't carbon-based? Now nuclear-based is in there too. You got to have that.

Could you have an entirely green economy? Let's say it was possible. Let's say the numbers worked. There