A personal message from the authors of Turtles All the Way Down
The message was sent to me, but it's such a great message, I wanted to share it with all of you.
If you haven’t seen the episode on my all-time-favorite vaccine book, Turtles All the Way Down already, you can watch it here (starting 30 minutes into the video):
Here’s the link on Amazon for the book. I got the paperback edition and heavily marked it up.
After the episode, here’s the message they sent to Nurse Angela of VSRF:
Dear Angela,
First, let me say that it took a few days, but finally all of us in the Turtles Team watched the fantastic discussion between Steve, Mary and Zoey last Thursday.
I was asked to express the heartfelt gratitude to Steve for the kind words he directed at us at the beginning of the discussion. Those were very powerful and some of us got quite emotional over them (especially those who watched it live). Steve really gets the book, and getting this high praise from him is very special for us.
So thank you Steve, a big thank you to all the people in VSRF that made this happen, and thank you Mary and Zoey.
I was really touched by receiving this message. The part they are talking about was at 38:10 into the video.
Follow up: How can we motivate more people to read the book? One way is to offer large monetary rewards for finding errors!
I’ve noted in the past that the hard part about the Turtles book is getting the 60% in the “persuadable middle” to read it.
One way is to offer a lucrative reward for anyone finding an error in the book.
For example, when you offer the book to your friends, they will invariably say, “That’s all complete junk… I refuse to read it!” In my case, it’s worse. I’ve been told I’m a complete nut job and it would be a waste of their time to talk to me about the data.
In fact, high tech entrepreneur Eric Hahn said something similar to me a few days ago. He offered, “If I told you the moon was made of swiss cheese, would you debate me about that?” I told him I respected him and if he felt that way I would absolutely be interested in hearing the evidence supporting his belief. He didn’t like my answer. He thought I would say “of course not!” Wrong.
But I digress…
People are going to give you all sorts of reasons for not wanting to read the book. So here’s my idea…
First, you whip out your audio and video recorder and capture the moment.
Then you say, “The book is only 500 pages long. How about if I pay you $1,000 for every page that you can find at least one error on? If you’re right about it being junk, you’d get $500,000 just for reading a single book which will take you less than a day. Would that motivate you? $500K for a day’s work?”
They can’t say they don’t have the time. The average person reads 40 pages per hour for non-technical information. So unless they make $40,000 per hour in their day job, they should jump on it. IMMEDIATELY.
The only real difficulty is finding a neutral arbiter for disputes that the reader will fully trust. Any ideas on that (compare with the method rootclaim uses)?
If you find an error and the authors agree with you, you win $100.
If the authors don’t agree, then the stakes rise.
If you want to dispute the authors rejection, you put a $1,000 per error deposit up. If you lose the dispute, you lose the $1,000. If you win, you instantly double your money.
A similar technique is used by rootclaim. See their offer and the rootclaim $100K challenge. The mechanics were published here.
Due to the negotiation overhead to set everything up, I’d be happy to consider doing a $25,000 (or more) minimum wager based on 25 or fewer error claims. This means you can win $25,000 for finding just a single error in the book. So even if you find just one error, it’s worthwhile to read the entire book (if you earn less than $25,000 a day).
I’ll provide the funding backing the book’s authors claims, but on any challenge we’ll open it up to my paid subscribers on Substack to participate and instantly double their money when we win. I would love to reward my readers who want to participate. I suspect we would get a lot of reader engagement on this.
The fine print
Only substantive errors could. So a typo. spelling error, or something with no consequence doesn’t count. If the book said “Masks protect people 100% from COVID” that would qualify as a mistake.
We’ll only pay out once per error to the first person who reports the error.
Summary
Let me know what you think of this idea to motivate people to read the book?
Cannot thank the Turtles too much, great to have so much access to so many resources and qualified perspectives. Kennedys book was a really great beginning but Turtles supplies the heavy artillery
I bought the book and can’t wait to read it. So I have a 5 year old. I won’t let him get covid shot. I’ve been so alarmed by the covid Vax that I’m seriously concerned about all the other shots. I don’t want him to get a single flu or any other shot.