A lot of people asked me for the last few weeks to talk about Dr. Shiva's ideas of treating coronavirus and I hadn't really looked into them until today. So I have a preliminary opinion.

My preliminary opinion is that in essence what he's promoting, or not promoting, it doesn't have any money in it as far as I know, but what he's recommending is that some kind of an intensive vitamin treatment with specific vitamins, I think A and D and C, would make a big difference in the coronavirus. You're treating it.

Now here's the thing. I have to give you some background. Some of you know years ago I tried to start a food company making this burrito product that I tried to stuff with all the vitamins and minerals you would need for the whole day. I thought, wouldn't that be great? You could eat a delicious burrito and make sure you've got all your vitamins and minerals so even if the rest of the day didn't go well, you'd be set.

And in that process what I learned is that the science of nutrition is largely made up. It's just all garbage. And the science of vitamins and minerals is extra garbage. So part of the reason that I ended up bailing out is that I couldn't make a product with a claim that hey it's got these vitamins and minerals if all the science was evaporating behind me.

When I started it I thought the science was pretty solid but there was honestly just an assumption. I just assumed we knew the vitamins are good for you, right? Did you assume that science knows if vitamins are good for you and which ones and how much? There's no such thing. The science of vitamins is largely just ridiculousness.

Now I'm not saying that vitamins have no value. Obviously you need your vitamin C so you don't get scurvy. Vitamin D probably does have all kinds of benefits, etc. So some of the basics we certainly know. But beyond the basics it's just the Wild West.

So I may be biased by the fact that I spent time in this domain of vitamins and what I found is that it was all charlatans and garbage. That was my experience. Now does that mean that the next thing that comes up is untrue because all the last stuff was? It doesn't mean that at all.

So I'm confessing my bias. So hear this part really clearly. My bias is that when I hear a remarkable sounding claim involving ordinary vitamins, even at high dosages or even if they're intravenous, but if I hear something that's an extraordinary claim about vitamins, I just assume it's not true. Okay, so that's my starting point.

Let me give you an analogy to make my point. If you get an email from a Nigerian prince who says he can get his money back from a bank 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 for identification? No you don't, because it's an email from a Nigerian prince. That whole category is very unlikely ever to produce a real one.

Might there be, I mean I can't say there will never ever be a Nigerian prince who's in really got some trouble and you could help him if you just return his email. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying I've never seen it.

So if somebody tomorrow says hey, I know these have mostly been not true but have you seen this email? It's from a Nigerian prince and I know, I know, I know why you're saying that all those other ones were not real but I feel good about this one.

So analogies of course are imperfect and therefore it's one of the reasons that they never persuade anybody and I'm sure I didn't persuade you with that one. The point is I'm biased. The point is not that you should believe it's real or not real based on that story. The point is I'm biased.

And so when I see a remarkable claim that has this form, it's very remarkable and suspiciously the medical community is ignoring this claim and or is unfamiliar with it. So if it's a remarkable claim about vitamins and the other claim is that the medical community is missing this obvious thing, it's sort of in the category of things that are never true. But again this could be the one time. Maybe it is.

So I tweeted it out. Dr. Shiva had some exchanges with something. I tweeted it out because it had links and description of why he was talking about it and asked any experts to give me an opinion whether it looked real.

Now if some experts comment and say Scott, Scott, Scott, he's on to something, well I'm open to changing my mind. I could definitely change my mind. I would just have to hear somebody smart say oh yeah yeah I get it. All the other Nigerian princes were fake but honestly this one looks pretty good. If somebody says that I'll reconsider.

But so the question is out there. Now I saw in the comments somebody says you should debate Dr. Shiva. Are you kidding? Are you kidding? What good would that do me debating Dr. Shiva?

Let me do the debate for you so that you don't have to sit through it. I will now act out me debating Dr. Shiva on this topic. This first I'll do the role of Dr. Shiva. Blah blah something I don't understand meaning Scott doesn't understand and vitamins and stuff and science and I have multiple degrees from MIT.

And then it's my turn to debate and I say I know I didn't understand any of that. Honestly babe I don't even know where do we go from here because I don't even know what those words mean. Do you have a book or something I could read to learn about this microbiology stuff and immunology and virology and statistics? If I do a little studying I'll get a little studying and then we can have this debate again. But at the moment I don't know what any of those words mean so we're not getting anywhere.

You see there would be no point in a debate, right? Because I would say it's my bias that these things are usually not true and then what would he say? Well I can see why you would have that bias based on your experience. Right, that's sort of the beginning and the end of the debate. Because I think Dr. Shiva would say well of course you've just admitted that you have a bias. I can see the reason you would have that bias, your experience. Of course you have a bias that way. That's it. That's the whole debate. We're done now because I don't understand his points. That's why I asked for somebody else to explain it to me.

All right. I think what triggered me is that in Dr. Shiva's tweet he made an assumption about Bill Gates's motives, Bill Gates's internal thoughts. And if you pair something that looks sketchy just by its nature, even if it's not, it just looks sketchy because of its nature, and you add that to conspicuous public mind reading, well that does not help your credibility. Because it seemed like that was important, that it would require knowing what Bill Gates was thinking and that what he was thinking was he was trying to make money with vaccines or something.

So somebody sent me a link to PolitiFact where they fact checked all the wild Bill Gates rumors. Now my version of debunking the wild Bill Gates rumors, mine goes like this and maybe you've heard this argument before. Blah blah blah Bill Gates wants to depopulate the world. Here's my argument. You know all those Nigerian prince emails? That's the end of my argument because it's just such a ridiculous claim. I'm not going to spend one second googling whether Bill Gates ever said he wants to depopulate the world. Do you know why? Because if you ever thought that was true there's something wrong with your brain.

All right this is not something you google to find out. Maybe he said he wants to depopulate the world. He didn't say he wants to depopulate the world and you know I checked PolitiFact and of course that never happened.

What was the other one? The other one was some horrible thing with vaccines in India. And I actually thought that one could have been true. It's just that even if it had been true it just would have been an example of a drug trial that didn't go well. It wouldn't mean anybody was evil or had bad intentions. I know this whole point of the drug trial but it turns out it wasn't even true. So that whole India vaccine thing was just all made up, just BS.

So I tweeted that if you want to go follow the links so you can convince yourself. So if any of you thought that the Bill Gates stuff was true you really should have asked me.