Hello there, I'm George Frankly.

It turns out even the best and brightest people can still make terrible decisions and stupid predictions.

Let's see what we can learn from them. This is Dare to be Stupid.

This time on Dare to be stupid, how much skepticism is too much? Is there really such a thing?

Let's fill out your skeptics toolkit. It's data, deltas, and doubts.

I have a sugar problem. My relationship with the short chain carbohydrate is complicated.

I want it, I want to be with it, but we're just not good together. Especially in the late afternoon when I have the worst sweet tooth imaginable.

I know it's just going to make me tired and scatterbrain, but I crave a sugar fix after 2pm on work days.

So, for the longest time, I got into a routine of stopping by the office vending machine and grabbing an Otis Spunkmire chocolate chunk cookie. I love baked goods, and at only 9 grams of sugar, it's way lower than any other typical junk food.

Honestly, the only downside to the Otis Spunkmire chocolate chunk cookie is the fact that a receipt line item reading

Otis's Spunk chunk was going to show up on my account every day.

But I was still just as sugar crashed as ever by the time evening rolled around.

And in a rare moment of post-6 p.m. clarity, I eventually stopped and thought about that number.

Nine grams of sugar. That's not just fantastically low. That's super naturally low.

You can't make any good junk food with only nine grams of sugar. Ah, shit. It's nine

grams per serving, isn't it? If one of those cookies is actually two servings, well, I may have

just played myself. I looked over the rapper the next day. The good news is that I was wrong.

The bad news is that there was no good news.

One Otis Spunkmire Chocolate Chunk Cookie was, according to the Lillipusian pastry engineers at Spunkmeier H.Q.

Four goddamn servings.

If I had actually read the whole label instead of latching onto the numbers that I liked,

I would have realized that I was wolfing down 36 grams of sugar in seconds every single day, somehow both ritualistically and unceremoniously.

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