Episode 166 - Lockdown Memory Holes and Rates of Return
Today Max discusses the efforts by media and tech giants to censor all alternative viewpoints on the Covid Lockdowns, and efficacy of the lockdowns themselves. Are there any remaining justifications for them? He also discusses 2 ways of looking at investments and gambling: expected value and expected rate of return, and why you might want to prefer the latter.
Links
Loss of Freedom of Religion
Wall Street Journal: Supreme Court orders In Home Prayer Meetings
Wall Street Journal: YouTube’s Assault on Covid Accountability
Odysee.com: The Alternative YouTube based on LBRY
Nick Hudson: The Ugly Truth about the Covid Lockdowns
WSJ May 2020 on Aaron Ginn: The Lockdown Skeptic They Could Not Silence
Aaron Ginn article on archive.org (reach into the memory hole!)
Related Episodes
Episode 155 on Why Oppose Censorship
Episode 120 on The Reopening
Episode 111 on the Covid Data Deluge
Episode 94 on Ratios
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum, Episode 166.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome, everyone. You have reached another Local Maximum. This is April 12, 2021, Episode 166. Happens to be my birthday today and Local Maximum episode date, Monday happens to line up with my birthday. And I have to say I don't have—well, I have a ton of episodes in the can that I've already recorded. But you know, hey, rather than doing four interviews in a row, four—I guess—in row, four or five, I figure why not do a solo show, just for today. So that way I can get you know, some stuff is on my mind. I can get some stuff off my mind. Not all of it's positive, but some of it is. But what can you do? And yeah, get, stay in practice, in the art, of the solo podcast.
So first a little bit today we're going to talk about the times that we're living in, which are crazy. And I kind of want to get away from it in some regards. But in other respects, like I've got this weekly podcast, got to talk about it at some point. And then after that, we're going to talk about a concept called the rate of return and expected value. Seems like something you'd get in investing or gambling. That's pretty straightforward. But it's a statistical question. And there's some stuff there that I've been looking at, but seems a little counterintuitive. And we'll talk about why. And it's not like very complicated math. It's the stuff that anyone can understand. So all right, let's start again. I'm going to be a bit fragmented today because why not?
So first, an interesting section I found from, that I think is relevant for today, from a political platform in the United States in the mid 19th century. I'm not going to say who it is, but I thought it was relevant. So let me read a clip from this political platform: “Beginning, tyrannical and unconstitutional laws have been enacted and enforced. The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been infringed. Test oaths if an extraordinary and entangling nature have been imposed as a condition of exercising the right of suffrage and holding office. The right of an accused person to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury has been denied. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures has been violated. They have been deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. And the freedom of speech and the press has been abridged. The right to choose their representatives has been made of no effect. Murders, robberies, and our sins have been instigated and encouraged, and the offenders have been allowed to go unpunished.” This was written in the mid-19th century. And honestly, a lot of it looks like the problems that we're having today. So they were seeing some dark times in their country. And I guess, well, in one sense, it's good to know that a lot of this stuff has happened before, and we've come out of it. So I'm sure we'll come out of it again.
So first, let's look at all the COVID restrictions and the COVID lockdowns. And specifically, I want to talk about the conversation around it. We still have most states that aren't fully open yet. I did Episode 120 on the reopening last year, but that was just when New York City went from the hard lockdown that we started in March 20, 2020, to the more soft lockdown that we've seen ever since we haven't been able to shake. And some people say we need it, some people say we don't. I'll get to that in a second. My current home in New Hampshire is not one of those states with those types of restrictions, though. Mask mandates are there and from personal experience. It's not always followed or enforced, only sometimes. So, look. In terms of these lockdowns, I can see why we took these drastic actions last year in March and April, when people really didn't know what we were dealing with. And they thought, you know, maybe we can lose tons of lives. Or we could save tons of lives with these lockdowns and with these restrictions.
And I have not seen any data so far. And I've been looking at charts and graphs and arguments, you know, for a year now, and I have not seen any data showing that lockdowns lead to less sickness or less deaths. I mean, it's this overly simplistic thinking that if we just force people to do something that looks like it slows the rate of the virus, then it will slow the rate of the virus. Just just force X and we'll get X. But that's not always how it works out in public policy. In fact, that's usually not how it works out in public policy. And look what happened. You know, you have—it's not just I mean, people kind of distill it into very simple terms like, hey, look at California and look at Florida. California is closed, Florida is open. They have similar climate, similar high dense population, and their death rate is about the same. Well, maybe there are some ways to account for that. But I haven't seen any arguments that account for that.
And so it really appears that if we do kind of a causality study on these lockdowns and restrictions, then it appears that if you had locked down when you hadn't, you wouldn't have saved any lives statistically. And if you hadn't locked down when you had, you wouldn't have ended any lives from COVID, at least statistically. So I think that there is a morality of it where you can't— I think it's immoral to disrupt the lives of so many millions and millions of people. And this has led to so many health issues of people not getting the care they need. So many mental health issues, depression. Ao much disruption of school, and for what? Right now, it appears that these restrictions have been for nothing.
That's not to say… That's not, you know, COVID denialism. That's not to say the virus isn't there. That's not to say that individuals and organizations shouldn't take the proper precautions. But it is to say that these… Basically turning our society into—a democratic and capitalist one—into a authoritarian, a command and control economy is, that's a totally different thing. And it's not worth it. It should always not be. I'm surprised at how many people don't see that that has happened, and are not as concerned about, oh, there were a lot of people who are. I'm sure that some of you have, again, it was another reason why I don't want to talk about that often, because there are other people who are talking about it. But it still is very kind of distressing to me, especially living in New York through that, how it so quickly turned into basically living in an authoritarian country. And it really sucks, you lose the freedom of assembly, and they say, well, it's temporary, but there's no justification for it anymore. Because those restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of religion. Yeah, we can't go to church or mosque or synagogue. It seems like those restrictions have not affected the death rate. If you say it did, it would have, it's only statistical noise. I don't think it's right to do this. Just because you think something lives in statistical noise. That's, you know, that's not a good justification.
So we lose freedom of assembly. You can't have a democratic society without freedom of assembly. So especially for my friends left in New York State. I mean, I guess you're there because your friends are there, you've just been there and you haven't moved yet. And your your job is there. But like, why, in what sense is anything going right is what I want to ask. Where, when are we going to get back to normal? Can we get back to normal? And is there anything like all of the benefits of living in the United States? Do we still have that? Because it looks like it's there, it's under attack. Maybe it's been under attack for a while, but that attack has been intensified. And not just intensified. But like, you know, a switch has been turned on and they've gone full, you know, full, crazy authoritarian mode over the last year. You know, we've had a loss of freedom of religion. The Supreme Court of the United States, fortunately, has ordered California to allow in-home prayer meetings.
But then it's like, that's just a small thing. So they don't like the people. They were preventing people from having visitors in their own home for the purpose of religion. I mean, that's like basic First Amendment stuff. And the state of California wouldn't allow it. I mean, it's one thing to say like, hey, March and April, we don't know what we're dealing with. We don't know how to mitigate the—we don't know how to mitigate the risk of this virus. But now a year later in 2021, there's no longer any excuse for it. So anyway, I just had to get that off my mind.
Someone convinced me also, that all of the COVID content disappearing from YouTube and Medium are because the experts at those places really know what they are doing. So why were they—I mean, I remember back in the beginning of the lockdown and beginning of COVID back in March of 2020, there was an article written by someone, what was his name? It was—his name was Aaron Ginn and he wrote an article against COVID hysteria. He wrote the article on Medium. Medium took it down. Now, what was their justification for taking it down? Is it the only Medium article that had something false in it? They said it was spreading false information about COVID. Well, clearly Medium does not have a general policy of fact-checking every article. So I think they're—I think it was part of the hysteria taking it down, which, ironically, is what the article was about, is that well, anyone who tries to minimize COVID is a threat to public health. And therefore we have to—rather than just part of a debate on what's going on, therefore, we have to take it.
So you could still get his article, but not easily. You have to go on archive.org, which just kind of saves stuff from the internet. You know, you can't get it on Google. You can't get it anywhere else. It was saved on Coin, what was it, Zero Hedge for a while, But that's gone now. So I'll link www.localmaxradio.com/166, to see the article for yourself. What was every prediction that he made in the article correct? No. No, it was not. But it's every prediction. Was it more wrong than the predictions being made by the experts at the time? Absolutely not either.
So why are we doing this again? I asked. And so, you know, he said, Hey, this virus is going to be less severe in the summer months, because it spreads less in the heat, in the sun. And it turned out, yeah, he was right. It turns out yes, the virus has been far less strong in the summer. Remember, it went away, almost completely in June, July, August, and then in September. And then it came back in October. And now, what is it now it's April, and it's starting to go away again. So he was right about that. He was right about, he wasn't saying there's no such thing as COVID, you know, go out and don't take any precautions. There are some people saying that. But even that, like I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't censor that. That's just, well, I've been against censorship the whole time.
When was my whole thing against censorship? I think I did a whole episode about that. Why Oppose Censorship, Episode 155. I'll link to that as well. So let's not let that get memory hold. There have been so many people who've just been removed from YouTube, from Twitter, on this subject. Another one is, here's another one. This is on www.odysee.com. So odysee.com is kind of a YouTube alternative that is based on LBRRY, LBRRY. It's like library with no vowels. I don't know why you'd name something like that. But anyway, that's the protocol. So it's a bit more decentralized. So you really can't, you’re not going to see the type of censorship that you see on YouTube. I'm going to link to a video by Nick Hudson, who, again, it can't be on YouTube but it was on a conference in South Africa. It's called ‘The Ugly Truth About the COVID-19 Lockdowns.” And he goes into how destructive this has been, in terms of regular people's lives, and to society. And is it worth it? How is that not a legitimate question to ask?
But our overlords in the internet have decided that it's not. So who's gonna defend this to me? Who's gonna tell me why we need to do this? I've never seen, it's one thing if you are censoring thing, and you give justification. But it's, I wouldn't be for it then. But it's another thing when you're censoring all this stuff, and we're not even given any justification for it. We're not told you know why it's important to remove all this stuff. So recently, and this is why it came up, we had, there was a public hearing in, this was in Florida. Linking to The Wall Street Journal here. Sorry, I don't have all my talking points set up today. So we're gonna just try to wing it a little bit.
But this article in the Wall Street Journal is from April 8, so a few days ago, ‘YouTube's Assault on Public Accountability.’ The company scrubs a video of Florida Governor Ron de Santos, his policy roundtable with physicians and scientists. So again, this is a public hearing, publicly funded. I mean, if anything—and by the way, in public hearings, not everything that people say is true, not everything people say you're gonna agree with. Sometimes someone's gonna say something that you think is harmful to the country, to the state, whatever. That's every public hearing, that's every debate in a democracy is like that. And the idea is, if you're going to have a democracy, or as I like to say, kind of a democratic society, or an open and free society and all, you need to have these things open to the public. You can't just say, “Well, this is bad, we're gonna take it away. Some of the things that the average people said, we've determined are not good.” And I know, I'm preaching to the choir here a lot. But I'm just trying to establish the pattern here, when it's one thing, they've gone from random people on the internet, to now public hearings that we're not allowed to hear anyway. Because public hearings could be\dangerous to our health to hear stuff that we don't want to hear.
And again, this was, what was this about? This is sort of, they range from, are we going to open the schools or not? Which a lot of people are saying. I mean, you know, the New York Post had a bunch of letters coming in today saying, “Hey, open the schools in New York,” there are people saying, “We're going to close it for years, we're going to say, hey, some years, like someone's entire high school could be offline, from ninth grade to 12th grade.” Think about how crazy that is, offline, or online, I guess. And for what reason? I don't know. So, again, I'll link to the one in Florida. Everyone knows this is going on, a link to www,odysee.com, Time to Reopen Society.
So there's this need to sense of this stuff? Is this like a forever war, an information that they have? Is it forever going to be? Hey, we just have to make sure that the right information gets out and the wrong information gets memory holds just for forever, for all time? until, you know, until people learn their lesson? Is that the war that they're fighting? I mean, I don't think you could win that war. They think they can win it, apparently. I don't know. But maybe they don't think that far ahead. We don't know unless we get their justification, which we don't have. We always had public hearings, open public hearings in this country. And it's not just this country, it's like most open countries around the world have open public hearings. Or at least they say they do. And they've never censored bad information. So I don't really get that. Some other people that have been censored, El Gato, the bad cat El Gato Malo. He was on Twitter, talking about COVID for many, many months, and was skeptical of the experts. He's been taken off Twitter. He’s now on substack.
So yeah. Here's an article from the New York Times again, from a couple days ago. And the New York Times is not talking about this at all, of course. But this article is sort of interesting, because they're going back on what they said previously, which is fine. I don't have a problem with people saying one thing, and then later on coming out and saying, “Well, we've learned we were wrong about this. And because we have more information now. And so now we're going to take that information, we're going to have a different opinion. I mean, that's what Bayesian inference is all about. But if you're going to use that, then you also have to hear all information. You shouldn't be censoring critics and stuff. So this one from the New York Times four days ago is, ‘Has the Era of Overzealous Cleaning Finally Come to an End?’ This week, the CDC acknowledged what scientists have been saying for months, the risk of catching coronavirus from surfaces is low. Now, I don't know about you, but at the beginning of this pandemic, in March and April, I was very worried about the packages coming in.
I remember, and to make matters even worse, the government of New York had banned bags, they’d banned plastic bags. And the grocery stores weren't quite ready for it. So they had these paper bags where there was no— that you had to pay for. And so the grocer or the person at CVS had to handle every bag and all of your items individually and put them in, and so it was like everybody was touching everything. And I was very concerned about that. A lot of people were very concerned about that.
A lot of people were washing their groceries. I was doing that a little bit. But it turned out that—and by the way, not necessarily irrational. We didn't know. We didn't know that that was not how COVID spreads. But apparently, even though there were some people saying it, but I'm sure the people who were saying it at the time were being censored and ended up being right. So now the New York Times is saying that, but they're not—they wouldn't—of course they're not gonna say in the article, “despite censoring X, Y, and Z, we're now saying this.” They're like, “no, we're now saying this, no one ever told—no one told us this could be the case back last year, but we're just changing our mind.” So all right. That's fine.
I mean, it was always kind of, not obvious. But it was sort of obvious to me that this thing spreads very quickly through the air. I mean, there was a long time where they were saying that they weren't sure if it was airborne. But in New York City, we went from nobody getting sick to everybody getting sick very quickly. It's not like everybody's touching every surface in New York City. I mean, you do touch quite a few surfaces, but we do wash our hands.
So I'm like, “You know, what, it's got to be spreading through offices through…” You know, it's sort of like, in Foursquare when we shut down and one person got sick. I don't think anybody else got sick after that particular incident. But people were like, oh, what if I touch the soda machine? If I touch the soda machine, am I exposed now? No, it was probably the kind of thing where, you know, it was passed through the air and I think nobody at Foursquare got it because the person was not symptomatic yet. And, you know, not spreading yet. I think that, you know, just be that I know this is a big deal about asymptomatic spread, but I feel like if this was a while before the person got it, maybe asymptomatic spread is not that big of a deal. Maybe, I don't know the situation with asymptomatic spread. I don't know if, hey, maybe a day before you get symptoms, you're already spreading it, but it's not, it's probably not right away. So anyway, I just have to talk about this stuff, because I feel like the media is just, is gaslighting us. It's driving me crazy sometimes.
I'm also going to link to an article from the Wall Street Journal. This was back last year, May 15, 2020, ‘The Lockdown Skeptic They Couldn't Silence’, targeted for censorship in March, Aaron Ginn is becoming an influential voice in city states in Washington. Unfortunately, they did silence him. I mean, look, you can't get that article anymore, except on archive. And honestly, it's— what do we do about it? I think the thing we do about is—don't allow these things to be memory-holed. First of all, I wish I had a better call to action, but take some time to remember stuff that you were supposed to forget. Because it's hard to— a lot of the stories that we get on the media assume that we were born yesterday, and we haven't been paying attention for a long time. Or hey, this kind of contradicts the story that you saw last year, but we're not going to take that into account because we're gonna assume that you don't remember last year. So let's just try to remember it.
Okay. I think that people, I think there is kind of a hysteria. It doesn't mean that I would say, you know, don't take any precautions, and, don't, and I don't know how much I have to say this. But I think that, you know, by nature, people are live and let live. Most people, I'm gonna get some push back on this. But I think that most people in the country, most people in the world don't really care what their neighbor is doing. So I think—and they're so wrapped up in their own life, that they don't really have a, they don't want to punish the people in their community or in their country for whatever sin or crime or wrong thing they think they're doing. I really do think that most people are like this. And in order to have power over people, for politicians, you need to convince the populace that whatever their neighbor is doing, I know you don't want to do anything about it, but be afraid because that is going to be your undoing. So if you read op-eds, or public service announcements, or if you're listening to celebrities or listening to politicians, look for that particular template of argument. This is kind of a game changer if you do.
So the template of the argument is, hey, you might not care if other people are doing X, but because other people are doing X, it's going to lead to this horrific crisis Y, and therefore you need to empower Z, that's us, to force people not to do X. Next time you read a newspaper or listen to a PSA or a political speech watch for that template because it appears more often than you think. And it's—it's true. It feels like half the messages that we get out there is, “Be afraid of your neighbor, be very, very afraid.”
So I don't know, I feel like pointing that out maybe can have some kind of effect. But I don't know. All right, I just wanted to get that out as solo because I just want to talk about. Maybe I don't have the right, maybe don't have the quite the right words for this, maybe I'm not the best one to do it. But hopefully we could talk about this more often as I get more guests on, or maybe when Aaron comes on. So that'll be good. All right.
Now we're going to do a little bit of a math lesson, a little bit of an investing and gambling lesson. We all like that. Let's talk about expected value versus the long term rate of return. So in school, you learned about the mean, the average, the expected that or the expected value. And you learned two of them, usually. You learned about the arithmetic mean, which is the one that you usually think about, and you learned about the geometric mean. So why is that, and which one is more important? And here's a good reason that, when it comes to thinking about investing and gambling and gaming, they're both important. And even though the arithmetic mean is the one that's used most of the time, it's actually the geometric mean that you want.
So you might have heard of a gambling strategy called ‘double or nothing.’ It's not a gambling strategy. It's just, it's just a gamble, hey, double or nothing, you put down $100. And there's going to be a coin flip, or some game a chance with even odds, and there's a 50% chance that you get $200. And there's a 50% chance that you lose everything.
Well, if you look at the expected value of that, the expected value of that is going to be $100. That's kind of an even play, you could say well, that therefore I know that if the downside remains zero, and the upside remains, let's say get goes a little bit higher than $200. Let's say it goes to $201. Then if I play that game over and over and over again, eventually I'm going to come out ahead because it's, my expected value is greater than zero. But that's not quite true because you're actually, it's not just lose $100 versus gain $100 dollars, it’s actually based on the amount of money that you're putting down. So for example, if you put down $100, you make $200. Well, next time, you could actually put down $200. And then, you know, you can go up to $400, you can go back to zero. The problem is what if you play that game over and over and over again?
Well, it's kind of obvious, what will happen if you continue playing all that game that game over and over and bet all your money. That's like leaving some money on the roulette wheel on red and just letting it ride forever. Eventually, we'll get to zero because you'll lose one of those bets, you'll get to nothing. And you will, you'll lose everything. And so, the question that arises is, well, what would be a good game to play then, if double or nothing is really bad? What would be a good game? Well, the answer is not to necessarily increase the upside in that bet. Like, let's say you were playing triple or nothing. Well, you know, you're, let's say you put down $100. And you can get $300 or zero. Well, your expected value from that is $150. That sounds really good. But unfortunately, you'll still eventually lose that bet and go down to zero and blow up.
Another thing to watch out for is what if you increase the odds that you're on the winning side? Well, let's say you're going to increase your money by 10%, you're going to get a little money out of it, you're going to put down $100. And you're probably going to get 10 bucks, increase your money by 10%. But there's a small probability, but not negligible, let's say 1-2% probability that you'll lose everything. And even then, you know, assuming that that play, that that game is played over and over and over again, eventually you're going to hit that bad luck, you're going to hit that landmine, let's say on the roulette wheel, it's like landing on one of those green zeros. And then you're going to just lose everything. And then that'll be the end of it. And the reason is because your expected value from playing things once is the arithmetic mean and your expected value of playing things multiple times, let's say through infinity, infinite number of times, your expected rate of return is the geometric mean.
So let me give you—let's give another example. That might be a little bit… Let me give a couple more examples. Okay, so let's, instead of saying there's a chance that you lose everything, obviously, we can't have that chance there. Because the chance that you—but of course, there's always a chance that everything blows up in life. And there's maybe not much you could do about that. But any chance that that is built in, you want to kind of eliminate that, because in the long run, that will probably happen from time to time.
So let's say that instead of playing double or nothing, what can we replace nothing with? And the fair game in that instance, I put fair, let's put “fair” in quotes here. But the game where you won't, you know, lose in the long run is not double or nothing, but double or half. So in other words, you put down $100, and there is a, there's a 50/50 chance you double your money to 200, there's a 50/50 chance that you half your money to 50.
The problem is—now the issue is, the good thing is if you go down to $50, then hey, you just make the bet, again, assume the bet is available to make over and over again, then maybe if you just win, once you go up to 100, if you lose, you go down to 25. But you'll always have some raw amount to play that over and over again. Now, no casino is going to take that bet on the other side, because they're going to lose $50 on one side and the win $150 on the other. So that's no good for them. But if you find a bet for that, that is a good one to play over and over and over again. So then you could kind of make an inference.
Well, let's say on the winning side, instead of winning 100%, I went a little bit more than 100%. So let's say instead of, you know, winning $100, I win $100, or, let's say, instead of, instead of playing double or nothing, or half, I'm playing like double, like 2.1x over half, then it's like, okay, that's a great one to play over the long run, because then you'll get some rate of return. Let's look at something a little bit more, with more modest rates of return, let's say 10%. Let's say that there is a game where you put down $100, and there is a 50/50 chance that you lose 10 bucks, you lose 10%. The question is, what upside do I have to have to make up for that? Well, if you're looking at it from an arithmetic perspective, from the arithmetic mean, well, you need $10 on the upside, because then your expected value is going to just be zero. You would lose 10 bucks to gain 10 bucks, on average, and keep your $100. But if you're going to play this game over and over again, you're gonna look at it as a rate of return on your 100 bucks, then losing 10% and gaining 10% are not the same. So let's say you lose 10%, and you're down to 90. And then you gain 10% again, you're only up to $99, you're not up to $100. So you actually have to have a little bit more, you know, kind of 11, 11.111. But let's say 11 to 12% on the upside in order to make you make up for the minus 10% on the downside in order to get this work, so that you could play this again and again and again.
And that is actually how casinos can make money. Because if you think about it, well, it's like, Look, you're telling me that if I play a game, where it's like, hey, I lose some amount, and then I gained some equal amounts, then I'm going to lose that if I play over and over and over again. And from a rate of return perspective, like in the, let's say I put down $100. And I either lose half of it, or I make 150%. Well, sure, on the upside, I make $50, and the downside I make, I lose $50. But the problem is, if you're either losing half of it or gaining half of it, in other words, you know multiplying it by 1.5. Well, if you multiply by 1.5, sometimes and you multiply by 0.5 the other half of the time, then, effectively if you play that over and over again, you multiply the two together, you're actually multiplying by 0.75. On average, you're losing 25%. So that's not good.
But when you're looking at much smaller rates of return, and the upside of the downside are very similar, but the upside is a little bit more, then you're actually making a rate of return. So let's see you put—again, let's go back to the example I had before, if you put down $100. If on the downside, you lose 10, you lose 10%, on the upside, you gain, say 12%, then you're making a rate of return on the $100. And that's how kind of the casino wins, even though their bet, and your bet is almost the same even—and theirs is like they have kind of like a slight edge, they have so much capital invested just in the business of the of the casino, and they're playing the game over and over so quickly—that in terms of the rate of return, they're making a good rate of return over time. So that's an interesting way to think about it.
You know you can't win in a casino game, in a betting game, but you can win doing something like that in the game of investing. And those of you—I've been looking at getting a rate of return on crypto recently. And so you'll see that on staking too. So it's like—it's not just that you're betting $100, you're putting down $100, you're waiting some period of time. And then you kind of have, you're kind of expecting a rate of return. But a bunch of things could happen, it could be a big rate of return, it could be a small rate of return, it could be a small loss.
And so you ask yourself, “Well what is my expected rate of return?” And so it wasn't the mean expected value, when it comes out of it that I'm looking at, what I'm looking at is actually the expected percentage rate of return, which is a little bit different, that's going to be the geometric mean, the geometric expected value of the potential outcomes. Which, instead of the arithmetic mean is you're adding them all up and dividing by the number of. you're doing a weighted sum and divided by the total weights. Let's say they're all equally likely, you add up all, let's say you have 10 possibilities, all equally likely, you add them up and divide it by 10. The geometric mean you multiply them together and take the 10th root, raise it to the power of one over 10. And I guess that makes sense if we're talking about it. It's really just the arithmetic mean when you're talking about it in terms of log space, but I'm sure I lost some of you on that.
So anyway, if any of you, again, this is not getting into very complicated portfolio theory. But I thought that was an interesting concept that is, sort of simplified things and helped me think about, you know, which investments are good for the long term, and maybe that will help you. All right, maybe I'll write more about that. And, you know, just just a quick one today, I just wanted to get a few things on my mind, off my mind. And we will continue next week with some of our interviews. I had a really cool interview with Iracema Trevisan the other day about augmented reality in cities. So we're gonna get to that.
Still waiting to talk about The Fourth Turning with Aaron, we might do another news update. So all this is coming soon. Oh, and we have a very kind of special announcement coming soon on The Local Maximum. And that is, I might have a place where we can do videos in sort of a room in my apartment that I'm putting together. And that's going to be exciting. So look forward to that. All right. Remember, sign up for Locals, www.maximum.locals.com. The website is www.localmaxradio.com. Have a great week everyone.
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