Episode 859 Scott Adams: Humans Rule, Coronavirus is About to Drool. We Are Going Weapons Hot Soon
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Chloroquine study 100% CURE RATE, Gregory Rigano
Julia Cheek, EverlyWell.com will have home test kit MONDAY
Ian Hilgart-Martiszus serum therapy
More good news
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
You know, do you ever feel guilty being in the middle of a pandemic and still finding a way to have a tremendous time every now and then?
Oh yeah, we've got to take this quite seriously.
But we can still have our fun.
And this is one of those times.
Well, welcome to The Simultaneous Hip and Coffee with Scott Adams.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Including a pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous SIP. And it happens now.
We have a hospital worker here joining in the SIP. Thank you for your service.
Normally I would reserve that for people in our military.
But can you make a distinction today between a healthcare worker on the front line and somebody in the military?
Well, you can, but it's a minor distinction.
So if you see a doctor or a nurse, thank them.
Maybe don't say service.
We'll save that for the people in the service.
But thank you.
So, what is special about today?
What is special about today?
I'm going to call the elbow.
Now the elbow is what I've been telling you for a while is coming.
It's the elbow of the curve.
I'm not talking about the virus curve.
You know what I'm talking about.
You're talking about the slow acquisition of information that the humans are doing on a global scale.
And I told you that this is largely an information problem.
What drugs work against it?
We need to know. What types of people are most affected?
We need to know. What worked, what didn't work?
We need to know. And of course, who has it?
We need to know. If you get the information, The virus is toast.
So it has always been an information problem presenting itself as a healthcare problem because that's the ramifications.
But I told you from the start, if there's one thing we're good at, humans, hashtag human, We're good at finding information and we're good at doing things when we're all on the same page.
The only thing that ever slows us down is when we're not on the same team.
That kind of stopped this week.
We're kind of all on the same team at the moment.
We'll deal with China later, but at the moment, same team.
Enemy of my enemy.
And the elbow looks like it's happening.
Now, Some would say that you still need some kind of an omen.
Wouldn't you like that?
Wouldn't you like that there were some kind of a sign?
If you're a believer, you'd say, well, there's God telling me everything's going to be okay.
If you're not a believer, maybe you like the simulation.
Maybe you start seeing coincidences.
And you say, ah, the simulation is winking at me.
Now, I don't think any of these things pass any kind of scientific rigor, but sometimes doesn't it feel good when you just see something that just says, I think everything's going to be okay.
Now, I'm not going to lie to you, next two weeks might be a little bit rugged for you, and for the people who catch the virus, it's going to be horrific.
That's going to happen. You don't have to stress about, should it happen?
How do we stop it? The next two weeks are going to be rough.
That's just the way it's going to be.
But, there might be some good things coming, and I'm going to talk about them.
But first I want to give you just a simple tip you can try at home.
Now, this may sound silly, but try it.
If you're feeling a little bit anxious about all this stuff, and of course you do, of course you do.
The strongest person in the world is going to feel a little bit anxious today.
Here's a little tip.
And don't laugh at this because it actually works.
Find a nice soft blanket and wrap it around yourself.
Just see how it feels. Now the softness is a big part of it, because if it's on your arms, you know, nice fleece kind of blanket, and you're just going to feel comforted.
It's just a physical thing.
It's not even psychological, I don't think.
I think, you know, we're designed so there's a nice warm embrace of something soft, even if it's just a blanket.
It's going to make you feel better.
And I... So I got...
I actually ordered a blanket for only this purpose.
So, I put on my blanket yesterday, and it totally feels better.
This is a real thing.
Just find a nice soft blanket during the day.
Just wrap yourself up in it.
I swear to God, I feel great right now.
It's not a joke. I'm going to keep this up.
But let's talk about what's happened.
Most of you saw the clip from Tucker Carlson's show last night in which it was being announced that there's a cure.
Now, do we believe it yet?
You know, it's in the category of things one should not Automatically believe.
So anytime somebody says, hey, we studied 40 people, which is not a gigantic sample, and 100% of them were cured with chloroquine, the drug that I've been talking about for a while, the rumors have been that it was effective.
So apparently there's a French study now, That allegedly, and I'm not a scientist, and I haven't looked at the study, and I haven't reproduced it, so don't take my word for it, but this is the report.
It's 100% effective at curing the coronavirus after you have it.
Now, if you missed that, let me say it again.
We just completed, just completed, a French study, From one of the most, I guess, one of the most famous and talented scientists in this exact field.
It's been accepted for publication, so now it's passed at least that step.
And they tested 40 people and they had a 100% success rate.
Now I guess the math on this, assuming that others look at it and they agree that the test was organized correctly, and I think people are saying it was, Apparently the math on this, even though it was only 40 people, the odds of it not being real are very close to zero.
And apparently that almost never happens.
And as Tucker asked his guest, Tucker was appropriately skeptical and amazed at the same time.
Watching Tucker's face...
When this scientist, who's completely credible, by the way, a known, credible scientist, saying that the coronavirus has a 100% cure, and it's a pill we already make, and it's well known, and it's safe, and it's already been used in other countries.
And Tucker is hearing this, and the look on his face...
It was worth just watching the whole show just for that moment, because he was having the same experience that all of us were having at home, listening to it for the first time, which is, what?
I don't know if I'm hearing this right.
Is that possible?
That there's a safe, effective, widely available pill that's already on pharmacies that's 100% cured?
Apparently there's only one other time that we've cured a virus.
Um... Yeah, so there's only one other time that humans have learned how to actually cure a virus, and so this would be the second time if it's real.
So we have some precedent that you can actually cure a virus with the right meds.
I think they do it for...
You'll remind me, whatever the problem is.
So here's some other things coming down the line.
First of all, There's some troubling suggestion that China knew this and was maybe not as forthcoming as they could have been with sharing the information.
Now, this is not yet the time to look backwards.
So just put a tack in this one.
A question we're going to ask Did China know this worked, I mean actually know it works, long before they made it widely available to other countries at risk?
It's a pretty big question.
That's a real big question.
Because, you know, I'm going to stick with this, and I'm going to say it a million times in the next year.
I have no patience...
For people who look at other people operating in an emergency, trying to do the best they can, and then sitting on the sidelines and saying you should have done it sooner.
You're going to get sick of me saying the idiots in the room are the ones who said it should have been done sooner.
But I'm going to make an exception.
The argument there is that everything that's good should have been done sooner.
So if you're making a comment that something should have been done sooner, it has no meaning.
Because that applies to all things good.
Should have been done sooner.
Hey, why weren't you smarter?
Why didn't you see it coming? Why didn't you work harder?
There's no exception to that.
It always should have been done sooner.
But I'm going to make an exception in the case where it was intentionally withheld.
Now, I'm not going to say that that's the case.
But if it turns out that China maybe knew more than they shared, and it was intentional, just speculating, Wouldn't you like to know that?
So, if that's the case, I wouldn't feel the same about a delay if it's intentional, of course.
Some other good news.
You know, this is sort of a wildcard thing, but actually it might be important.
One of the things we're going to learn...
Even though we didn't want to learn it, is what happens to CO2 and maybe, potentially, a little bit more about climate change risk, etc., etc., based on the fact that we reduced air pollution substantially and probably will last a month.
So will the scientists be able to take advantage Of the rarest thing that could happen, which is the economy of the world just stopping at the same time, and then watching the air pollution drop, and what do we learn?
Now, I'm not a scientist, so your first instinct would be, well, maybe nothing, because it's a short period, and it's hard to untangle all the variables, so maybe nothing, because CO2 is a long-term problem.
It's not something that happened this month.
But I'm not so sure.
I feel as if that might be enough data for, remember, you know, scientists are smarter than you, they're smarter than me.
So just because I can't figure out how to take advantage of that information doesn't mean somebody can.
And I would love to know if we actually experience anything like some seasonal coolness.
Now in theory, So here's my question.
If pollution goes out of the air kind of quickly, and we watched that already happen, so Wuhan was super polluted, and now it's not.
They might be back to work, but at least there was a period when it wasn't.
So we know that the air clears pretty darn quickly.
But what I don't know, and I'd have to ask some scientists, does that mean the CO2 clears?
And here's the dumbest question you're ever going to hear.
But I have no shame, so I'm just going to ask it anyway.
Is there such a thing as, you know, I'll just ask, if every ten years we just decided to shut down all industry and travel for two weeks, I'm just brainstorming here, don't take this too seriously, and brought our pollution down to zero, would those gains be any way permanent?
In other words, could you just stop doing everything for a while and let the CO2 settle?
And how long would that take?
Because pollution went out of the air pretty quickly.
But does the CO2, because of its nature, hang around longer even after you've stopped polluting?
I don't know the answer to that question.
But even if there's a small change, don't the scientists get an incredible amount of new insight just based on this unique situation?
I'll just put it out there as a question.
I think it's a potentially tremendous benefit, but it's a maybe.
Here's some other good news.
Julia Cheek, I guess she's founder of a company called EverlyWell, that today they announced she's calling it her proudest day ever, and I would say that might be the case.
She says we're launching the first solution in the U.S. to get tested and diagnosed for COVID-19 from your home.
On Monday. So this Monday, can you believe this?
By Monday, you know, there won't be many of them, I assume, but I guess they're cranking up production.
By Monday, we'll have a home test kit for the coronavirus.
And it's kind of come down to this.
It's a contest between viral spread and reproduction.
Versus American manufacturing.
You could say world manufacturing, but I think people are going to be keeping whatever they can produce to themselves for the short run.
So if suddenly some country could produce a lot of N95 masks, they probably need to keep them.
I don't know if they can produce enough to also export right away.
So most countries are sort of on their own in the short run.
In the long run, of course, they'll be sharing.
But in the short run, I think the U.S. probably needs to make its own masks pretty quickly.
Probably needs to make its own test kits pretty quickly.
And so it's come down to a contest, a fair fight.
It wasn't a fair fight at first.
We had no weapons. We had no tools.
We had no information. It was a sneak attack.
Boom. Virus is on us.
But now we've had a little time to regroup.
We did a strategic retreat.
We divided to conquer.
And then the smartest people in the world have been working on essentially a global Manhattan project to find every possible weapon you could against this virus.
And it looks like they found it.
Looks like they've found it.
Now, having that, the cure, if we can call it that, you know, there's still an asterisk on this, so don't, you know, if things change, don't say I didn't tell you it couldn't, because it could, but it's looking really good, I've got to say. And the other thing you need is the test kits.
So if you can massively test, and you've got a pill that you know that works, and you've got a strategy of delay and separation, We're on the cusp of one of the greatest American achievements of all time.
I might be wrong.
I could be wrong.
But if I were to sort of straight line this where it's going, I think by the end of the summer, The United States' full strategy, if you look at it from closing the airports,
which was the first action, I guess, to delaying, to building tools, learning from the other countries, and then once we have the weapons, and right now we've identified the weapons, we know this drug, it would be insane if our government is not working hard to produce this drug already.
You know, if you've got that one gold standard kind of good test that says it worked 100% of the time, you should be cranking that out.
If by the end of today, you've not heard your government say, well, just in case, we're still making sure this works, but just in case, we just put a billion dollars on it.
We just dropped a wad of cash and the U.S. Army and the full weight of American manufacturing on it.
And we're going to make the hell out of this pill.
It's the chloroquine, I guess, and there's a stronger version as well.
We're going to make the hell out of this pill.
I guess there's another one that goes well with it.
Just in case.
If you don't hear that by the end of today, you should lose some confidence in your government.
I'm going to be honest. But I think you might.
And I'm actively trying to get that answer, so I'm using what contacts I have to see if somebody can tell me, is there a specific manufacturing plant That we're putting the full weight of the United States power, money, arms and legs and brains into it, and that it's happening right now?
If you don't hear that by the end of the day, you should lose some confidence.
And I don't mean that what they tell you is that it's working great, because it's like everything, right?
Day one of doing anything is going to be just nothing but mistakes.
But if we're not putting the energy into it, You could reasonably lose some confidence in your government and nobody would say that you were being unreasonable.
End of today. Today is the day.
The country needs to hear it.
Now, how good is the news today?
Let's check my stock market.
Green, green, green, green, green.
Green, green, green, green.
Green, green, green.
It's all green, baby.
It's all green. We're going weapons hot.
Not yet. Not yet.
Don't have enough of them.
But we know the weapons now.
And when humans start working, it can be an amazing thing.
Here are some more things we know.
Over in Belgium, They've adjusted their protocols.
Now, what I'm going to tell you now is from a guy I don't know on the Internet.
So if this is wrong, well, you know, sorry.
But it sounds like something that's right.
So, you know, that's the best I can tell you.
It sounds like it's true that Belgium has adjusted their protocols to give that, to give the even stronger version of the chloroquine and the hydroxychloroquine To all patients with medium to severe symptoms.
So they're giving it to all patients.
So they're not waiting for severe.
They're giving it to all. Medium to severe.
So more data on success rates should come up then.
We're going to know a lot In a week, two weeks tops, because Belgium will be reproducing it, presumably with enough information that we'll really feel more confident about what we know.
Patriot Ian Hilgard-Martizas has put together, and I tweeted it, you can see it in my Twitter feed, one of the best Just one of the best things I've ever seen.
I'm sort of a data geek.
If I see a good presentation about data, it just makes me tingle.
I don't apologize for that.
And you have to see what he did.
So the question he was looking at was a convalescent serum.
What that means is people who have already recovered from the virus have the antibodies already in their blood.
And so there is a mechanism, it's known, it's something that China used and has reported on with some success, that if you could identify the cured people, take their blood, you play with the blood a little bit, whatever you do with it, and then it turns into something that you can inject into somebody else and give them a little resistance.
I don't know if it's full resistance, I don't know if it's just good, those are things to know.
But wouldn't you like to know What would that look like?
Is that practical? In other words, how many recovered people would you need to have enough supply for the people you need to cover?
Isn't that a good question?
At what point do we have enough recovered people who would also volunteer to give their blood that there's enough of it that you can start really protecting big groups?
And so Ian figured that out This is a field he has some experience in.
And he's a great communicator, one of the best you'll ever see in the technical sense.
And he comes up with this map of the United States and puts that number on each state.
It's kind of genius. So you can see, you know, I don't know, California was like 49 people or whatever.
Now everything's a snapshot, so snapshot in time.
So of course all this changes.
But it's a real good first take.
You know, of course, others who know how to You know, look at this stuff.
Probably should look at it and, you know, tweak it or adjust it.
But man, is that productive?
Information. That is really productive.
Because you've figured out how much blood people can give and how many people have it and stuff.
So, you know, we can keep refining that.
But man, that's just great work.
So, coronavirus, your days are numbered.
So we've got a convalescent serum method for some degree of protection.
We don't know if that's 100% or what percent.
We've got testing kits online coming.
We've got, I saw that Elon Musk may be getting in the fight.
Elon Musk, he was replying to, I don't know who it was, but the question was, Could he be part of the effort to mass-produce these N95 masks?
And apparently part of the problem is they're hard to make.
So it's not good enough just to have a factory.
You've got to have the right kind of factory and know-how, and it's not fast.
And so Elon has sort of entered the fight, at least in the question sense, and said that between Tesla and SpaceX, They have engineers who would know how to make a ventilator.
In other words, making a ventilator would be easy for the kind of talent he has.
That's basically what he said.
But he hasn't stepped up and said, we're going to go at that.
He said, you know, tell me which hospitals need ventilators.
So I think he's still testing to see if this is real.
Meaning, how important is it that he start converting the resources of Tesla toward ventilators, or at least helping somebody else do it?
So, I don't say he's fully in the fight yet, but if I were a virus and I heard he was getting that close to being in the fight, I'd be a little worried.
Somebody says, Mark Cuban on Fox.
I was going to talk about Mark Cuban.
He's on my list. And he had publicly called for engineers to figure out how to engineer a simpler version of the N95 so that we could make them faster.
I've got to say, I've mentioned this before, but there will be a lot of leaders who are identified during this crisis.
People have just stepped up, and he's one of them.
Mark Cuban, I would say, is one of the most important and effective citizen leaders in this crisis.
I give him just all kinds of credit for the way he's handling, not only the way he handled his business, And his employees, which was early and fast and public, great role model.
But, you know, he's continuing to find areas in which his unique contribution make a difference.
Probably we only know about a fraction of it.
So when you see that, when you see your most capable people stepping up, it just has to make you feel better.
It should. Let's see what else we got.
This is just a funny anecdote.
I forgot about it. So I guess, it might have been the day before yesterday, Bernie Sanders was asked by CNN's Manu Raju and asked his time frame for a decision about whether he'd stay in the race or not.
And this quote doesn't work nearly as well without the full swearing, because Bernie used a curse word.
But I'm not going to tell you that Tell your kids to leave the room because I'm not going to use the word.
But I want you in your mind to substitute that word because it makes it all funnier.
Because it's coming from Bernie Sanders and he's talking to Manu Raju of CNN. So Manu Raju says, asked him for his time frame for a decision and reportedly Bernie looked at him and said, quote, I'm dealing with an effing global crisis.
Right now I'm trying to do my best to make sure that we don't have...
An economic meltdown and that people don't die.
Is that enough for you to keep me busy for today?
Oh, Bertie.
The only thing I'm going to like better than Bernie running for president is Bernie knowing he's not going to be president.
Bernie unleashed.
Once he knows he doesn't have to do things or say things that are going to make him president because that's not going to happen, it looks like, at least internally, one could imagine that That he's made that decision.
Who knows? I can't read his mind.
But if you say to the CNN, if you turn to the CNN person and say, I'm dealing with an effing global crisis, right now I'm trying to do my best to make sure that we don't have an economic meltdown and that people don't die.
Is that enough for you to keep me busy today?
Trump has never dealt with CNN that well.
All right. Here's some more potential good news.
It's good news that emanates from horrible news.
So let me not underplay the horribleness of what I'm going to say.
I don't want to be Vanessa Hudgens and be viral tomorrow because I said anything positive.
But there was apparently a family of seven members who all got it, and three of them died.
Now, that's the tragedy, obviously.
So things can't get worse for this family, and so we feel for them.
But if three members of the same family die, there's a little flag that goes off in your head that says, genetic?
Is it genetic? Now, it's too early to say yes, although there's strong reason to believe that there might be.
But this family, and I don't mean to be unkind, but they did show a family picture, and I'll just say that They don't look like they go to the gym a lot.
I'll just say that. So you can't rule out that it was an unusually non-health-related family.
I just don't want to be unkind.
So you can't rule out that there was just something about the family.
They weren't taking care of themselves and that had something to do with it.
But I'm not suggesting that.
I'm just saying that we don't know the situation.
I'm definitely not suggesting that.
Just saying it's in the list of things you would look at.
The other possibility is, and again, this is very non-scientific, what I'm going to say, just something that would be in the hypothesis category, maybe a little bit more than a hypothesis.
Which is that the viral load makes a difference.
So if somebody in your family gets it and you're in close quarters, you may be getting a big dose of the virus and then maybe three people in the family have it and you're getting a real big dose.
So the entire story could be That once the family got it, they were just too close and didn't have enough ventilation, and so they just stewed in it until they got the worst possible degree of the infection, in the same way that a nursing home got it worse, in the same way that the cruise ship got it worse, because the marinating and the extra virus might make a difference.
And you could kind of commonsensically see why that would make sense, even if your common sense doesn't match actual science.
So this is just a question.
But I said this before, if your virus got into you just one way, let's say you touched your mouth after you touched something, Is that a slow-building virus that gives your body time to build up some defenses?
Versus, you know, if I walked up to you with a fire hose full of virus and just sprayed it all over your body and it was getting in every crack and hole in your body at the same time, would you recover just as quickly?
Now my common sense, informed by exactly zero science and zero medical knowledge, I think it would be worse if you got the fire hose of virus versus the little pinprick of virus as your initial infection.
Right? I mean, maybe somebody can tell me if that's just crazy.
But I think there's at least some medical intuition.
That people have had about that.
So, anyway, where I'm going on this is that there are people looking to do genetic testing.
If they can get samples of this family, samples of other people who have had good experiences and bad experiences, there's a very strong feeling that there's something about the genetic lung composition of some people that makes them more susceptible.
And we have the companies that can do that.
We certainly must have enough samples that exist.
Getting permission to get those samples, getting permission to test, and then getting enough of them that you have a useful thing could tell us a lot.
So remember, this is an information problem disguised as a health problem.
And If we could take everybody's DNA, imagine we could test you, test you at home, you spit in the test tube, just like 23andMe, but you put a lot more resources against testing.
Wouldn't you like to know?
And in my case, I've already done a 23andMe, so I don't know if that means they could just use what they already have.
That would be big.
So somebody has to answer me this question, please.
Those little tests that already exist, 23andMe and such, if you've already taken that, did 23andMe and the other companies that do that sort of thing, do they keep a full profile of your DNA? Or do they just pick out the parts that they know how to deal with and literally delete the rest?
Or not test the rest?
I don't know how that works. But do we already have...
Pretty big database that's a full...
It'd have to be a full spectrum, right?
You'd have to look at the whole DNA. Do we have that already?
Because if we do, imagine you find out that your lung receptors are the type that are the bad kind, or the kind that you're most likely to...
People in the comments are saying that they have the full DNA. I can't guarantee that's true, but a lot of smart people here are suggesting that that's hard.
Somebody was saying in the comments that saliva is the hardest thing to test for viruses, but that's not what we're talking about.
We're not talking about saliva to test if you have the virus.
I'm talking about using saliva to test if you have the genetic makeup that would make you especially susceptible to the virus.
Or, in the best case, especially non-susceptible.
So, that's another weapon.
So, let me list these.
So, we got the The medicines that appear to be 100% effective in trials.
We've got test kits that you'll be able to test at home.
We just have to ramp it up.
We've got this genetic potential that I think is actually a really high potential to be something positive here and really give us more information about who to protect the most.
We've got the indication that the The blood serum thing should be effective, and we'll have more information soon with the test kits of who's recovered, etc.
You can see it coming all together, can't you?
And I think we'll be making more masks and ventilators, too.
Apparently, I predicted that the drive-in theaters would have a...
We start popping up.
Now, I don't know if anybody's actually popped up an actual drive-in theater just for the crisis, but apparently the ones that exist, there still are some, are doing good business.
Oh, somebody said that I was in the red now.
Is that true? If that's true, it's not yet showing up on my stock ticker, but there is a delay there.
So, I wouldn't take that as true yet.
But keep an eye on it.
So, think about all those things that are positive today.
I actually scouted a location in my neighborhood.
There's a strip mall that's closed.
Well, the anchor store is closed.
Some of the small ones are still there.
But the parking lot is empty because the remaining stores are sort of onesie, twosie customer situations.
So there's this vast parking lot in the middle of my neighborhood with nothing to do.
And how hard could it be How hard could it be to put up a temporary screen and then...
I don't know what technology it is, but you should be able to stream to the car radios, right?
If you have the right technology, you can do a short-range FM situation.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
But if somebody can tell me what product that is...
Why is everybody saying the market is down when my ticker is not showing that?
Is that the delay? Oh yeah, it did turn down.
So yeah, there's a ticker delay.
So it just turned down. So here's what you're going to see today.
You're going to see news of the potential cure.
You're going to see lots of good news about lots of things.
But the market is also going to be seeing massive bad news.
So you're going to see more news today than you ever see in your life.
But like, you know, 80% of it is going to be bad because it's people having a bad time right now.
And that 20% is going to be, I think we can get a handle on it.
I think we can get a handle on it.
Alright, so people are saying the Dow is down.
You should expect a lot of choppiness in the next two weeks.
How are you doing on your micro steps?
Let me give you... A way to get going, because no matter what, we're probably going to be holed up for a few more weeks, right?
Best case scenario, we're still going to be staying home a lot.
And best case scenario, we'll be staying home a lot, no matter what.
Here's my recommendation, and I'm using this process myself.
Micro steps. I talked about this before, but it's a real good time to talk about it again.
So my new skill that I plan to pick up in the next few weeks, it has to do with my studio equipment, and there's some new software that I have to load and learn and use it all together, etc.
So I have my body of learning that I need to complete.
Now if I think about all of it, It's easy to ignore it, because it's like, well, it's going to be a lot of work.
I don't really feel like doing a lot of work.
Who knows? So, it's easy to ignore it if I see it as this big, hard thing.
So instead, I say, well, I'm just going to do one micro step.
So I did that yesterday or the day before.
I talked to the person who makes the software and he explained how to use it and arranging to purchase it, etc.
So it's a very small thing.
I just made a phone call, checked some stuff.
So if you're thinking about learning something, do that.
Do the smallest step.
If you're thinking about, oh, I'd like to pick up some skills in, let's say, marketing.
The smallest step...
Is to find the online course that is offering it.
And there are a few. So just do the smallest thing.
If you think taking a class sounds like a lot of work, just find out where it is.
That's all. Don't commit to anything else.
Just find out where it is.
And then the next day, maybe sign up.
You don't even have to look at any of the course materials.
Just sign up.
Ten minutes. And the next day, Just say, you know, I'll sample it.
I'll look at this for five minutes.
So that's the key.
You won't have many times in your life where you're going to have this much spare time that you can't productively do something outside the house.
So use it.
Learn a skill. Fix up your house.
Fix your space. Find a way to take advantage of this little coronavirus holiday we're having.
Let's see. I want to make sure that...
Oh, I forgot all about this, too.
So I mentioned this yesterday, but some of you only watched in the morning.
Health and Human Services announced that telehealth doctors will be able, and I don't know, maybe it's in general, but doctors will be able to practice across state borders.
So the federal government has just overruled all the state boards that control this stuff and just said, at least for the duration of the emergency, the doctors can practice across state borders, effectively tripling the capacity in one day.
Pretty amazing. Can somebody tell me the name of the M. Night Shyamala movie in which, I think Mel Gibson was in it, and Aliens...
Aliens came down and they couldn't be stopped.
But it turns out that the solution was water.
So when they thought everything was doomed, there was no way to solve it.
Oh, it's called Signs.
Thank you. Very quick.
Yeah, so the movie is called Signs.
And I've got to tell you that from the very first start of this coronavirus crisis, I couldn't get that movie out of my head.
And the part of it I couldn't get in my head was just the specific part where there was a weapon that existed and it was widely available.
Literally, it was water. And the aliens were killed by water.
And I thought to myself, I don't know why I can't shake this.
I feel like there's an existing substance or something on Earth that we just have to figure out what it is.
And I think we did that.
We, the public.
We, the scientists, anyway.
I guess that's not we.
So, I couldn't get that out of my head.
And this feels like the third act of a movie.
You know, where you're in that impossible situation and then you realize that water kills the aliens.
And I feel like that was the movie that we just found ourselves in with this Chloroquine, whatever it is.