Episode 867 Scott Adams: Sip the Morning Away and Get a Great Start
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Special guest: Aris Lavranos MD, answers key coronavirus questions
A message to our leaders in the Senate and the House
Chuck Schumer is not worthy of the public's sacrifice
The National COVID-19 Medical Equipment Clearinghouse
Go to ProjectN95.com
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I've got a special guest who's on my audio line, waiting to answer some medical questions.
Dr. Aris Lavranos, MD, offered to help us with some of the medical questions.
And I've got him on hold.
Doctor, say hi.
Hi there, everyone.
Alright, thank you. I'm taking my microphone away.
I'll have to aim my microphone in your way if I ask you another question.
Alright, everybody, you know what's next.
I know you do. It's a simultaneous sip.
Yeah. Aren't you lucky?
I know you are. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or 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 every pandemic go away, eventually.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now!
Oh, good stuff, good stuff.
All right, well, I've got the doctor here, and we don't get too many chances to ask these questions.
I'm going to ask some questions, and if the sound is bad, we'll deal with that.
Doctor, is Livranos the best way to pronounce it?
Yeah, you actually did a remarkable job pronouncing both my first and last name.
I won't lie, Scott. Most people butcher it.
That was really well said. Well, I'm sure I'll get it wrong next time.
So here's the top of the list of questions.
Number one, everything we've seen about the hydroxychloroquine looks promising, but it's all anecdotal.
Here's the question I ask you.
Have you even heard of any anecdotal stories that go the other way?
In other words, every anecdotal story we hear is positive, but again, that's not scientifically valid.
Have you heard anything even, you know, on the grapevine or personally where there was somebody who didn't have an underlying condition, they got the hydroxychloroquine in time, and then it still went bad?
So I can't speak about the hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus specifically, but in terms of Unfortunately, we have lots of examples of things like that.
A great example would be steroids for spinal cord injuries.
It used to be the mainstay of therapy and then found out that it was actually probably doing more harm than benefit.
But it took many months or years before we realized that.
So that's one example. Another example would be recently treated a patient with Bell's palsy and went through the whole evidence with the patient.
We used to give them antivirals.
We don't give them antivirals anymore.
We just give them steroids.
There's no real harm to having given them antivirals, but it doesn't produce any kind of a benefit.
From what I have heard, from what my colleagues are sharing online, I get about 15 to 20 email updates with COVID regularly.
I will tell you I'm hopeful that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin will be effective.
You know, I'm still looking for the first actual medical doctor who says, I don't think it'll work.
And I haven't seen that yet of you.
No, not at all. I can certainly say that.
Everyone is sort of waiting with bated breath to see if it'll work.
We're all hopeful that it will.
No one is coming out with any kind of idea or evidence to suggest that it shouldn't or would not work.
I haven't heard anything like that. Yeah, and one of the good things about this drug is that we understand the mechanism of why it should work fairly well, right?
That's well understood? The why of it?
Yeah, yes it is, but You know, I would be careful with that kind of logic because sort of, in hindsight, we can sort of justify why it's working.
You know, if you had asked three months ago, hey, do you think that we should use hydroxychloroquine plus or minus azithromycin to treat coronavirus, you would probably have had a lot of people saying, well, I don't know how that would happen, as opposed to now, potentially seeing in cases that it is effective, it's much easier to identify.
So I don't know that that mechanism that we believe Right.
Right, so I'm hoping that we are going to see some sort of randomized, and if not necessarily randomized, at least some control study groups where we'll be able to say, in these 200 patients who did not receive the intervention, their general demographics look like this, their general sickness levels were like this, their FiO2 requirements, whether they were or were not in the ICU, but the ones who did receive the treatment ultimately did get better.
So I'm hoping that, you know, based on the speed that things are happening, we should probably get something like that out of Italy.
Don't we have a severe ethical conundrum here, which is, it seems that anecdotally, the benefit of the drug is just...
It's at the highest end of anecdotally looking good, but not anywhere even touching the bottom of scientifically valid.
So given that people are actually dying from it, how do the doctors treat the fact that you don't really want a control group at all?
I mean, who's going to be in the control group when they could die and when the drug is basically nobody's dying on it unless they have underlying conditions, as far as I can tell?
How do you navigate that?
Is the test in New York City actually going to have a control group?
So, you're right.
I don't think that it will be the type of control group where we say, listen, you guys have registered, we may or may not give it to you.
I think that that would be, at this point, really unethical, especially with the level of panic.
It may have been ethical if we were not in such a state of emergency worldwide.
Right. Because this goes back to what you had said, about 80% of people would like to get better.
But I think it would be more a matter of, we gave it to these 200 people, and these 200 people who are very similar are our comparison, our control.
But I think your point is well made, that ultimately it won't be a rigorous, randomly controlled trial.
The thing I'm looking for, and the only indicator that I care about, because I feel like it's the leading indicator, would be how many people who are actually on the front line, doctors such as yourself, Who actually contract it.
We expect that'll be fairly high, but then actually die from it without some underlying conditions of their own.
And so far, I've heard zero of that in the last week.
Now, it might be early, because the total number of doctors touching an infected person is...
Well, put a guess on it.
In the United States, given our caseload, How many doctors do you think have come in direct contact with equipment, but direct contact with an infected person?
It's in the thousands, right?
Oh, without a doubt, it's in the thousands.
That's absolutely correct.
So I can tell you currently, Scott, I'm actually on quarantine at home for coming in contact with COVID patients at work in the emergency department.
And unfortunately, that patient was Deemed low-risk screen.
So, yes, had had travel, but greater than 14 days prior to his visit for respiratory illness.
Now, as far as I can recollect, I was wearing my PPE. However, because the patient had screened negative and still ended up having a very high viral load and ultimately is...
I think the condition of the patient is stable currently, as far as I know.
But because of that, I have been quarantined There are 25 physicians who work in my department.
On that shift with me alone, there were three.
So there were possibly three of 25 in that one instance, let alone all the other hundreds of patients who come into the department daily.
Now, is it your sense that people in your situation where you're not presenting symptoms, although I heard you clear your throat there a little bit, do you have any symptoms?
No. Okay. Do you think we're reaching a point where people in your classification, where it's not demonstrated that you have it, but you might have it, do you think you would probably have to go back to work if this gets a little bit worse?
Yes. We had a very strong disagreement, if I'm being honest with you, about whether or not I should be quarantined.
I was quite adamant that I didn't need to because I was appropriately gown and buff.
But regardless of those particular details, they agreed that it was a bit of a fringe case, that it could have gone either way.
And that's me coming in contact directly with the patient, because unfortunately that standard is far too high.
We need to lower the standard to allow clinicians and frontal And the quarantine is 14 days.
Yeah, so your quarantine is really still in the luxury category because the moment they need you, you're going back to work, I assume.
Yeah, that's well said.
Yeah. So, alright, so I'm going to ask you a question and I'm going to give you the option of deferring.
So don't feel like you have to answer this.
Think of the greater good.
Think of all the ramifications, not just the medical specific answer.
Your colleagues who are on the front lines, the medical doctors, are they prophylactically taking the hydroxychlorine?
And again, if you would prefer to take a pass on that question, that's perfectly acceptable.
I don't have a problem answering that question, because I can tell you honestly, thus far, we have talked about it.
I have one colleague who jokingly had suggested getting a prescription to go and pick it up.
I don't know if that person has or hasn't.
I don't know if that was sort of sending out feelers to get a sense of if someone would do them a favor to write them such a prescription, but...
Well, wait a second.
Can't you guys write your own prescriptions?
No, I cannot write a prescription for myself.
But you could write one for each other so that you could get it prophylactically.
And if one of your colleagues who was working with infected patients And was not yet tested, or at least not suspected of having it, but has been around it.
Would you feel ethically in this current situation, especially where there might be some shortages of the drug, would you prescribe it to a medical professional, not to a citizen?
Yeah, and so that's the sort of medical opinion I think is close to universal right now, and it really comes down to do you have supply and what's the specific situation.
Let me ask you another medical question.
And I don't know if we can decide on it today, but the issue is this.
With the shortage of masks, it's been suggested, but not in a way that I feel has enough credibility yet, that since the virus has a known lifespan on different materials, could you not use a mask, put it in a paper bag, come back to it in two weeks and feel pretty safe?
If you knew you weren't dealing with somebody who was known to be effective, just people who were suspected, would you feel comfortable putting an N95 mask back on if it sat in a paper bag for two weeks with no other...
Yeah, it's a good question.
I think you raised this question, if I recall correctly, last night on your periscope.
Yes. The issue is that, unfortunately, viruses don't last very long on these sorts of inorganic surfaces.
And this goes back to the idea that you had said, I think it was several days ago.
Technically speaking, we don't really even classify viruses as being alive.
They are this strange simulation injected matter that just messes around with humans.
But other infectious agents are.
So bacteria, fungi, all kinds of other things are.
And they can last a lot, a lot longer.
So it would have to be sterilized.
If it was my own mask, then yes.
We even still use our own masks for up to 8 or 10 hours on shift.
Okay.
That's not a problem.
Okay.
So that's exactly what I was talking about, though, was that you put your own mask in a paper bag and then you rotate it the second week.
In an emergency, obviously nobody would do it in any other way.
But to your point, if there were other, you know, germs, bacteria, whatever, whatever, but they were your own, they would be largely inert to you, wouldn't they?
If I told you, you know, if you drank from a cup and you left it on the counter for two weeks and it was in and out of the sun and whatever bacteria happened to be in your mouth were allowed to grow there, would you just go and pick up the cup later and drink it?
You could. You would ideally not want to, but you could.
So, you know, it's hard for me to say what kind of bacteria people have and the conditions under which it would grow.
We typically We're good to have bacteria to replicate in the ideal situation without changes and disruption and sunlight and exposure to air and all those other things.
So it could fester, but not necessarily.
So let's say you took your mask and you hung it on a clothesline and you left it there for two weeks.
It doesn't rain for whatever reason.
So the sun is just in and on it.
Would it matter the temperature around doors or would that pretty much kill them?
Okay, so there might be, in an emergency situation, some way to...
I mean, we're watching these amazing hacks.
I saw yesterday somebody who used hosing to turn a ventilator for one into a ventilator for nine patients.
Is your sense that the ventilator machine would be able to handle that?
I mean, the engine of it, would it handle the airflow for nine people?
Does that feel like that would work?
Yeah. Yeah?
Yeah. So I have some experience with ventilators.
I put people on ventilators in the emergency department, not infrequently, unfortunately.
I think that from a machine point of view, this sounds like it could handle it.
I would be more worried about sort of the software and the interface of the machine to do that.
We typically tend to control ventilator settings based on what we call either pressure or volume.
You cannot control both.
So the machine pumps air out for a certain amount of pressure or a certain amount of volume.
So I guess you could increase the amount of volumes if it's being distributed, but I've never seen the software being put through that kind of process to know that that's And there are quite a lot of different models of ventilators, so that's a hard one to answer.
Right. That's more of an electrical engineering question that would depend on each individual model.
But just off the top of your head, there's nothing that would eliminate the possibility.
You just don't know the details at this point.
Right. For example...
Who has very large lungs on the ventilator.
I see no reason why two children could not be put on that same ventilator with a bifurcating tube for each of them.
So I don't see something that's prohibitive about it if the software machine could do it.
Alright, next question. People keep asking me about taking zinc supplements sort of ahead of time because the hydrochloroquine interacts with the zinc in a positive way, so you might as well have some zinc in there.
Is that a thing? Would you recommend it at this point?
Let's say you had zinc supplements in your multivitamin or just zinc supplements.
Is it a good idea or not? Yes, I think it is a good idea.
I can tell you, Scott, that this isn't even academic.
I'm doing it myself. I take a multivitamin every day that includes a component of zinc.
It has been a while since I have looked at the evidence for zinc, but the last time I looked at it, the evidence against common colds and flus was weak, but it was there.
So you are certainly not doing yourself any harm by taking a Okay, so it might give you a little edge, probably won't hurt you, so it's worth a shot.
Alright. I recommend to people that they don't inhale any substances,
including marijuana, to keep their lungs as healthy as possible, that they take a multivitamin, which includes a component of zinc, vitamin D as well, and then that they are You don't want to gorge on a bunch of fatty meals or have a large proteinaceous meal that will steal resources and cause a lot of energy to digest.
So a little bit of exercise.
I've taken your advice that I'm no longer muscle building.
I'm just kind of maintaining, releasing some endorphins.
Wait a minute. I'm not sure the audience heard you that you're taking my medical advice.
Could you say that again?
And it's excellent advice.
You want to be circulating your blood.
You want to be in a state of fitness.
You want to release endorphins and be in the lowest level of stress possible so you come in contact with the virus.
So this is not the time to be pumping heavy iron, to be building lots of lactic acid, to destroying and rebuilding muscle that's going to cost energy and vitamins and resources.
Some regular exercise to release endorphins is the best thing.
Thank you for that.
Now, I feel twice as smart because, you know, my strategy is the strategy of 1%.
You know, if my walking in the sun is 1% and my taking the zinc is 1% and my getting some good sleep is 1%, you know, I can get up to 10%.
And a 10% edge against a deadly pandemic is That's a 10% hedge.
I'm not going to leave 10% on the table.
Not today. And Scott, I think that for someone like you, given your age and your comorbidities with your history of asthma, Yeah.
You know, I think trying to make that difference for someone who's otherwise young and healthy, probably they have all the reserve they need.
But, you know, I have told my dad has a history of what I presume to be COPD, and he's 67.
So I tell him to do all these things as well, to stay really well quarantined and good hand washing.
So it's much more important in a more vulnerable population.
Alright, I am working on my biceps, I've been telling people, but I don't lift too heavy.
Low weights. Alright, Doctor, I'm going to talk about some other topics, and this was really great, and so thank you for volunteering to do this.
I think the audience got a lot out of this.
My pleasure. Keep up the good fight there, Scott.
Alright, take care. Bye.
Alright, that was really useful.
Let's talk about some other stuff.
Let's see.
Okay. Just getting some important notices there.
Let me turn that off. Sorry.
All right. Here's a message to our leaders.
You know, you probably watched the House and the Senate basically fail to do the work of the people.
You just watched Nancy Pelosi and Schumer come in and kill the bill that the other Democrats had been negotiating in good faith.
Now, of course, the accusation is that, well, it's just political.
You guys are flying in and killing the thing that was going pretty well.
Other people say, well, it's a good thing they got there in time to stop this corporate giveaway.
You know, I can't tell the difference.
From the chair I'm sitting in, I don't have enough visibility on these proposals to say this is the good one, this is the bad one.
If we help these businesses, it will...
It will support X number of jobs that would be lost, but if we give money individually, they'll spend money, and that's good for the business.
If we can be honest, I don't know if anybody knows the difference.
Meaning if you assembled the greatest economists in the world and said, you know, the Democrats are leaning this way, the Republicans are leaning this way, one is more of a corporate path where you make the corporation healthy and that supports jobs, the other one's more direct, but then they become good consumers and they support the companies.
Which one of these is better in the long run?
And the answer is, I don't know.
If you imagine you know, maybe you should stop doing that.
Because you don't know. The reason that Congress can't agree is that they don't know.
So I think they default, this is just my presumption, so I can't read any minds, but I think they're going to default to what feels best politically and is compatible with their brand, independent of what is good for the country, because I don't think they can tell.
Not because they're not educated in this.
They're not economists. They're not.
But I don't think the economists could really...
I think that economists are going to be on different pages.
So we've got that situation going on, and our leaders failed us last night.
Let's just call it what it was.
Let's call it what it was.
Our leaders failed us last night, collectively, by not acting.
And we're in a situation where acting is probably more important than getting it just right.
That's sort of the emergency rule.
It would be great to do everything right if you could wait long enough.
You could make sure you've tested everything and make just the right decision.
That might be good in regular times.
But in an emergency, action just has a greater value.
Because we're managing the psychology of all of us and trying to hold it together.
Remember, this is partly a physical problem, you know, a big part, the life and death of it.
But in order for that part to be minimized, you've got to get the psychology of it right, too.
You know, the country's got to be on your side.
We've got to trust our leadership.
We've got to feel like progress is being made.
We've got to feel like we're winning.
We're getting on top of the virus.
And then Pelosi and Schumer Jet into town and just knocked the whole thing off the table when it looked like it was good to go.
Now, are they right?
I don't know. I don't know.
It could be. It's entirely possible that they came in and said, all you inexperienced people are making a big mistake.
You've just got to fix this thing.
Maybe. But are Schumer and Pelosi that much smarter about what's good for the country?
Then the people who were already in the room?
Is there something about Schumer and Pelosi that they had knowledge that could not be transmitted by the telephone?
Is that what happened?
Were Pelosi and Schumer not in continuous contact with the people who were negotiating for their team while it was happening?
What was it about flying in that changed the result?
Because they do have telephones.
And if Nancy and Chuck, as we like to call them, as the President likes to call them, if they had a problem with it during the negotiation, why are we finding out when it's too late?
I can't come up with a scenario in my head in which this is anything but a naked political incompetence.
Now, it could be after the fact we learned that there's more to it.
And I'm always open to that.
I'm always open to, well, Scott, you didn't know at the time there was this good reason.
And I'll be a little charitable because it's an emergency.
And I don't want to dwell on it.
I don't need to spend any more time talking about what happened yesterday.
But let me just make this point to our leadership, be they president, be they senators, be they representatives or mayors.
And it goes like this.
Our leaders are asking us, we the people, to make big sacrifices.
Big sacrifices.
They're asking us to take big sacrifices.
Your responsibility, leaders, be they presidents, representatives, senators, or mayors, your responsibility is to be worthy of that sacrifice.
I realize we're going to do a lot of the lifting, but We the people.
The hard stuff is going to be down in the trenches.
But you do have a responsibility to be worthy of that sacrifice.
And last night you were not.
You were not. And if you're thinking, oh, Scott, you're being political, let me round it out for you.
When the president, in my opinion, mocked Mitt Romney for being in quarantine, not good.
Not good. Not ideal.
I think we need all of our leaders to be worthy of our sacrifice.
Governor Cuomo in New York is worthy of our sacrifice.
My governor, who I've criticized a lot for the duration of this, at least the activities during the crisis, is worthy of my sacrifice.
He is worthy of my sacrifice.
I'd like all of you to be worthy.
And Congress isn't there yet.
So today is a request from the public.
I think I can speak for most of you in this narrow way.
You know, not in everything, but in this narrow way.
We need our leaders to be worthy of the sacrifice.
And you're not close in Congress.
You're not close. You've got a lot of ground to make up, and it needs to be today.
Tomorrow is not good.
It needs to be today. And action is more important than getting it exactly right.
That's a big deal.
I have a sort of a thought experiment question.
Normally, with these big economic questions, I at least have a point of view, meaning I can think to myself, yeah, that makes sense, probably, or doesn't make sense, probably.
Everything's sort of a statistical situation, if you're predicting it.
But here's one that I don't even have a little bit of a sense of, and I'm going to run it by you.
And let me tell you if this has any merit.
Suppose, hypothetically, and this is not a recommendation, it's a question, hypothetically, the federal government said that until further notice, and it might be 30 days or 60 days or 90 days, whatever the period that makes sense, nobody has to pay rent.
Nobody has to pay their mortgage.
Nobody has to pay for their power, phone, or cable TV. Nobody pays for the health care, and nobody pays for their insurance.
Now, what all of these have in common is that they're more like services than a physical product.
I don't think you could have a rule that says you don't have to pay for a physical product, like a loaf of bread or a phone or something like that.
That still has to be, you've got to pay for it, because things would go crazy otherwise.
But, just play this through in your head.
So we'll take them one at a time.
Nobody pays rent. Alright, that's good for all the people who pay rent.
And let's say that you don't have to pay it back later either.
It's just gone. It's just off the table.
Now, all the landlords would be out of luck, right?
So they would lose their income.
If you're a landlord and you've owned several properties, well, you lose your income for that month or three months.
But you're also not paying your rent, and you're not paying for your electricity or your health care.
So you would lose that, but also your expenses would go down the same as the people who are not paying you.
And again, I'm not saying this is a good idea.
I'm asking for help thinking it through, because I don't know anything this out of the box has been considered.
So how about you don't pay your mortgage?
So the banks don't get that income for two or three months.
Can they afford it? Well, I'll tell you, the banks are going to make a fortune when we get back to work, because all the people who need working capital loans They have good businesses that have been demonstrated by their past, and all they need is a little bit to just get back up and running.
Banks love those. I don't even know if banks, on the whole, are going to be worse off if you didn't pay your mortgage for three months.
And let's say you never have to pay it, it's just delayed.
You're going to pay the same amount you would have paid in the long run, but you delayed it three months, just as an example.
What about your electricity, phone, and cable?
Could we keep all of those things working if nobody paid for them for three months?
Well, probably.
Because phone companies are pretty rich.
Cable companies, power companies can probably get by for a few months easier than individuals can.
If my local power company, let's say, ran out of money and they couldn't pay All their employees.
Could they pay their employees half for three months?
Because remember, under this scenario, their employees are not paying rent, not paying mortgage, not paying for their own power, cable, everything.
So maybe PG&E can say, oh, God, this is going to kill us.
Nobody's paying for power.
But we can get by for three months as long as we pay our people half amount.
And then their expenses are lower, too, so they can get by a few months.
Just throwing it out there. And then insurance and healthcare, same thing.
Would it be easier just to suspend all our big expenses and make those big entities that largely could afford it just eat it for three months and then we'd just come up back and running Now, we might also, in addition to that, might require some UBI. In other words, it might not be enough that you don't have to pay your rent because you still have to buy food and maybe some medicines and stuff.
So you probably still need the UBI, but I'll just put that out there.
I haven't been able to read all the comments as they're going by, but if somebody had some visibility on that and you've got some economic background, could you tell me what I'm missing here?
Now, I realize it would have gigantic unintended consequences in places that would be hard to know in advance.
I mean, it could be quite disruptive.
But as long as everybody got food money and everybody still went to work to keep the lights on and the water flowing and everything, I think it would work.
Would it? All right.
I don't know. How long does it take to create a deepfake digital version of Joe Biden?
I'm thinking, you know, we might see that today.
Now, I'm just joking, but imagine if you will, there was some entity, you know, some deep state, you know, deeply hidden enemy who wanted to take over the United States like a dictatorship, but, you know, make it look like it didn't happen.
How would you do it?
Well, the first thing you'd do is you'd take some coronavirus and you'd drop it off in Wuhan.
I don't think this happened.
I'm just making a movie.
This is the movie that could come out of this.
So the movie would be somebody infects the world with a pandemic intentionally, but in order to cover their tracks, they put it somewhere next to a bioweapons lab, because of course people are going to think what came from there.
So you release the thing in a city that's near a bioweapons lab.
This is the first part of the movie.
I'm not saying this happened. And then...
You run a candidate who's sort of a shell of his former self and kind of doesn't even know he's on stage, but he's got good name recognition and he's going to get a lot of votes just because they know him.
And his name is Joe Biden.
But because it's a pandemic, you have the option of taking him completely out of the public eye, which you could never do in any other situation.
You couldn't. But you can do it in this situation.
And then we happen to be, coincidentally, at exactly the point in human history where you could pull off a deep fake.
Now, I'm not saying that's happening.
Again, I'm just doing the movie version of our reality.
So you do the pandemic.
You blame it on somebody else.
The world goes into lockdown.
You take your candidate who's a shell of his former self.
You lock him up. Nobody sees him except digitally.
And it takes a while to get the deepfake up and running.
And then you cancel all your debates, because that's not going to work.
Hey, pandemic, better cancel those debates.
And suddenly, you've got a deepfake president, and we wouldn't know the difference.
Now again, I don't think that's happening.
But isn't it a big coincidence that That we get the one time you've ever been locked down in your house and you can't go out in public is exactly the time in history that we can make a deep fake and exactly the time in history that the ideal candidate to do that with, Joe Biden, looks like the presumptive nominee.
Well, that's a lot of coincidences, but that's what makes it a movie.
All right. A lot of people saying, open the country right now, and some people saying no.
And let's talk about that a little bit.
Don't get trapped in the binary.
The most likely scenario, as I've been telling you for some time, is that we run our few weeks.
Now, the president has signaled, if you can read the tea leaves here, the president has signaled that He's very optimistic about this hydroxychloroquine drug used with azithromycin especially.
It's being tested in New York City, and I think they'll have enough patience and enough experience that they're going to have a solid idea about this drug in about a week, is my guess.
Because that's about how long it would take to be pretty sure that it's making a difference, if it does.
It looks like the president...
So he did a tweet last night...
In which he said in all capital letters, you know, we need to get back to work, and that he would make a decision at the end of our two-week period, which I believe is one week from now.
So in one week, the president says we're going to make a decision.
What's that sound like to you?
If the president believed that the most likely result is that it's going to be a few months of lockdown, would he have tweeted last night, It's important to get back to work.
We don't want the cure to be worse than the thing.
We'll make a decision in a week.
Does that sound like somebody who has a serious intention of locking you down for three months?
It does not. Now, we know that the president can get a little ahead of the experts.
We know he can get ahead of Fauci's, at least, public optimism.
We don't know what he says privately, but Fauci's public optimism is You ought to be a little cautious.
But the President is clearly signaling some good news ahead.
Now, does the President know more than you and I know?
I hope so. Does he know more than Dr.
Fauci knows? Of course not.
But it makes sense that they're doing the dance, sort of good cop, bad cop, but in the form of optimist and pessimist.
I would say not pessimist.
Fauci is more like a realist.
I would say he's not a pessimist, he's a realist.
And he's saying, it's just a fact that drugs need to be tested, it's just a fact that we can't know how dangerous it is, and it's just a fact that scientifically, according to the rigors of science, it can't be demonstrated that it works.
So, you know, Fauci's sticking with the facts.
I won't call him a pessimist.
That's just facts. And Trump is sticking with optimism, so he's over there.
But I feel like they're signaling That a plan is coming together, and I think it's going to look like this.
The president has pretty good instincts, and I think he knows, sort of like my Captain Kirk and Scotty the engineer analogy yesterday, it's like, give me warp six.
Scotty, I cannot give you warp six.
It'll come apart. You can do it, Scotty.
Give me warp six. All right, and he gives you warp six, and it looks like the ship's going to fall apart, but it doesn't.
So, you know, in those stories, the mythical Captain Kirk has just some kind of magical intuition that he can just feel the right answer somehow without the details.
And we have seen that our president seems to demonstrate a weird kind of instinct that's been right a lot.
You know, his instinct to close the airports early being the most obvious example.
So, I'm not saying every one of his hunches will always be right or always has been right, but he does have a track record that's not inconsequential, that should give you a little confidence.
And he's clearly signaling that there's something like a get-back-to-work plan brewing.
Now, here's what I think.
Using the Greg Gotfield model, don't be trapped in the prison of two ideas.
In all likelihood, it's going to be something between let everybody go back to work and don't let everybody go back to work.
In all likelihood, it will be some middle ground that gets us moving in the right direction.
Movement and direction are the important things for confidence, for psychology, for the markets and everything else.
So getting some movement in the right direction, no matter how small, your president understands how important that is.
I mean, that's his specialty, really.
So he knows that direction matters.
I would expect that at the end of the two weeks that they will announce something, even if it's small, That is directionally positive.
Meaning, for example, I'm going to let these jobs or these industries go back to work, but only under these conditions.
So it might look something like that.
And then you say, ah, finally, at least a few people got back to work.
How about next week? Well, next week, we'll see how that week went.
Maybe a few more.
Maybe loosen up.
Maybe tighten up the restrictions.
But basically, play it by ear, but with a firm commitment to That it's a path toward re-employment.
So I think you're going to see the president say, we've looked at the week of experience in New York City with this hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin cocktail.
I think he's going to say, it looks like it's stopping the deaths.
And it looks like it's speeding up the recovery.
If we can get to stopping the deaths of the people under 60 with no health problems, then I think your president can ask you for the following sacrifice and would be worthy of it.
Would be worthy of the sacrifice if this happens.
I think he's going to ask the American public to take a risk.
And I think he's going to ask the American public to take a risk for the benefit of the republic.
And I think he's going to tell us straight, this isn't going to be safe.
I'm going to ask some of you, the young, the fit, especially the ones who have the most critical jobs, I'm going to ask some of you to go back to work.
I don't know if this is next week or soon.
It's going to be a risk, and I'm going to ask the over-60s to stay home, and if you can help them, do so.
But I think...
I think it's going to be very much your president asking you directly to take a risk with your health and your safety for the republic.
He's a war president.
This is a war against a virus.
Your war president needs to ask you directly to take a risk.
It makes a difference.
It's one thing to say, you know, I think this is a good idea, here's my guideline, and we'll probably comply.
But it does make a difference if you ask directly.
I know this is going to be hard.
I know some of you are going to be lost.
But we have to take the hill.
We're at the point where you just have to take the hill.
Now, if you're worrying about closing the economy versus opening the economy, I have a firm opinion that a two-week closure isn't going to be a fatal blow.
A three-week closure, also not a fatal blow.
I think we could take a month, but this is where the Captain Kirk and me start saying, okay, Scotty, I'm not going to ask you for warp 10, but I might ask you for warp 8.
So in my just feel of the mood of the country, my reading of the zeitgeist, my projecting from my personal feelings, my lifetime of experience, a month is the absolute ragged edge.
Especially if we have a drug that's working.
So I don't think your president's going to take you a month to get some people back to work.
I would expect that if you can telecommute, that you will be asked to continue.
That's what I would expect.
And I would expect that if you have to be physically present, there will be some new guidelines for that.
Maybe we've got some extra masks by then.
But that's what it's going to look like.
All right. Baron Ash asked this question.
This is user on Twitter, Baron Ash.
So here's his tweet.
He says, 55,000 deaths from seasonal flu in the U.S. I wonder how that has affected capacity.
So this is a question that says, you know, is this coronavirus really going to affect our capacity?
Because we've only had, you know, X hundreds.
Well, how many deaths in the United States?
And how many hospitalized?
So I think 20,000 are infected.
Most of them won't be hospitalized.
So this sounds like a good question, right?
If we have 55,000 deaths, and God knows how many hospitalizations from the regular flu, why would we be afraid of this one?
Well, here's my answer.
10 is bigger than 1.
If the regular flu, let's say on a scale of 1 to 10, is a 1, Because we know that this one, the one we're dealing with, the coronavirus, might be 10 times as viral, and therefore 10 times as many people get it.
So you might have something like the normal flu, with their 55,000 deaths in the course of a year, and it's sort of spread around the country, etc., is capacity.
Now, capacity in this sense means you've still got 10% left, because in a normal year, you're not going to use all of your capacity, but Let's say 90% or 80% of your capacity is what capacity looks like in a normal year.
We're already higher than that.
And this is just getting started.
So the way to look at this is if on a scale of 1 to 10 the regular flu is a 1, and we're probably designed to handle that plus a little bit more, 10 times that is going to be too much.
Because what we're looking at is something like 10 times as bad as a seasonal flu.
But here's the catch. It's on top of the seasonal flu.
The regular seasonal flu didn't take a vacation.
The 55,000 deaths are still going to be there.
This would be 10 times that on top of it.
So the math of it is 10 to 1.
If you're wondering why the seasonal flu is something we can handle, but why is this one different, just remember the number 10.
If we had to flex up by, let's say, 30%, could we do it?
Yeah, probably. Probably.
If you put a drain on our hospitals of 30% more, we could get it done.
It would hurt some people.
Lives would be lost. It would be a big hardship.
But we can get that done.
Nice 30% flex if we had enough time, a few months to get ready.
But could we flex by 10 times?
Because that's the proposition.
If you don't do the shutdown, And this is important.
If you don't do the shutdown, you could quite quickly get to 10 times the size of a problem of a regular flu, and then the whole system crashes.
And then other people are looking at our infection rate at the beginning of an epidemic, and while we're all locked down, and before we have testing kits, and saying, this doesn't look like a big problem, oh, please, please, people, That's not the right way to look at it.
It's the beginning of the epidemic, and we've done draconian measures to the economy, making us all stay home, just to keep it under that, and it's brand new, and it's ten times as viral as the old stuff, you know, the normal stuff.
Don't look at that little number that we've taken draconian measures to control, and it's new, and we don't have enough test kits to really know how much is out there.
Don't look at that.
That number has no meaning.
No meaning. Because we closed the economy.
The number that you want is the one you don't have access to.
The number you want is everybody went just along with their normal business.
We had big crowds and events.
What's that look like?
Because that's the number that matters.
If you're saying we shouldn't have closed down the economy, you have to compare it to the number you don't have.
Which is, what if we didn't?
We don't know. Because we did.
So you need to up your game of what you're comparing to.
Just don't make those common mistakes.
Alright. Here are the little signs I would be looking for.
Some of these you've heard before.
If you're looking for good news and you're wondering if the hydroxychloroquine makes a difference.
By the way, I think the plan to go back to work will be Once we get enough of that supply, once we know it works, the young people will go back to work, take their chances.
The death rate will approach zero, I think, with the drug.
So the things to look for are any of our American doctors, let's say they're under 60 themselves, who are dying on the front lines.
So far I haven't heard of one.
Which suggests they have access to the hydroxychloroquine.
And that might make the difference.
Because you know they're getting infected.
There's no question that the doctors are getting infected.
But it's early. So that doesn't mean we know anything yet.
Because it might be just early.
And maybe you'll hear about that later, tragically.
What I would be looking for is that the infection rate is zooming.
Because we'll be testing more, and it's just deeper into the pandemic.
So you should see the rate of infection just going up like you expect a pandemic.
Maybe we'll take the top off it a little bit with the flattening of the curve, but you expect still a pretty big, healthy increase, even if we flatten the curve.
But if you're getting good news, you're going to see the infection rate in Zoom Well, the death rate of people with no underlying conditions approached zero.
And you should start to see that in New York City starting around this week.
So here's the most important number you should look for.
People under the age of 60 dying in New York City from this virus.
I think it's going to approach zero, except for underlying conditions.
That would be an indication that we've got to plan out.
You would also expect that the President wouldn't be quite as optimistic and quite as, let's say, foreshadowing about what's going to happen at the end of two weeks.
I don't think he would be giving us this kind of optimism unless he knew a little bit more than we did, and we assume he does.
You should also expect, and I tell you this a million times because it's always true, that it's darkest before the dawn.
So a week from now, as much as we are anxious and complaining and fearful for the fate of the economy and our country and ourselves, as much as we're afraid of that this week, next week's going to be pretty rugged.
Let me not candy-coat it.
Psychologically, and also financially, Next week is going to be rough.
It's not going to be like this week.
It's going to be tough. Tough for a lot of people.
Really tough for a lot of people.
And if we help them out, we can ease that.
But next week is going to be tough.
And you're going to be saying to yourself, and I've been predicting this for a while, you're going to be saying to yourself, man, it doesn't look like we have a way out.
Man, I think we hit the wall.
Humanity is in trouble. The whole economy is going to crash.
We can't take much more of this.
That is exactly how you should feel right before the turn.
So in other words, you can't tell the difference between being on the precipice of really bad news and being on the precipice of the turnaround.
They would look exactly the same.
It's going to be way darker next week.
And that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Meaning that the best way to take the Starship Enterprise out of danger is you might have to run it at warp speed 8 and it's not designed for that.
So next week we're going to be at warp 8 and our economy is not designed to do that for very long.
So that's why I'm pretty sure it's going to be short.
Because the smartest people in the world Looking at this problem, President Trump is not making, you know, decisions in a vacuum.
All the smart people are saying, you know, do this, don't do this.
I don't believe there are any smart people who are going to tell the president to lock down the economy for three months.
I just don't see it happening.
I think Mnuchin was trying to give you, you know, sort of a worst case there, and he succeeded.
Here's what to look for.
Other countries who are now in the maturity, the mature end of dealing with this, let's say China and South Korea, I would expect that even if their infection rates go up and down for a little while, that their death rates, because I believe both of them have access to the hydroxychloroquine by now, China especially, I imagine they make it.
I don't know that, but I imagine they make it.
So I would look for their death rate to approach zero, again, for the people under 60 with no conditions.
And that would tell you you can get back to work pretty soon.
Let's talk about this question of...
I'm kind of interested in this from a psychological as well as a health and economic perspective.
The masks.
And I would propose this following way to understand this.
And this is preliminary and speculative, but I think I'm right.
You know, bounce against your own opinion.
That if in normal times, the value of a doctor's time is very high...
And the value of an individual N95 mask is very low compared to a doctor's time.
So what would be the best way to handle your mask situation?
In normal times. Well, the best way would be use it once, or whatever the guidelines are, and then throw it away.
Because the value of a mask is trivial.
The value of a doctor's time is very high.
You don't want him to get sick, and you don't want him to take any extra time to disinfect his mask and stuff like that.
So that makes sense. And you would imagine that the people who make the masks would be recommending that.
Because, of course, it's safer to throw it away.
So of course the manufacturer is going to recommend the safest thing, which happens to be compatible with their profits.
And I wonder, and this is just a question, if the medical community simply got, I'll say hypnotized, by routine into thinking that you have to throw the masks away.
But Somebody's saying lawsuits, yes.
So you want to drive the risk to zero if doing so is a small expense.
In those cases, you'd always do it.
But now we're in an emergency.
And what's happened is that the value of the mask is getting really higher, and the value of the time of the physician hasn't changed that much.
They're still very important.
But the value of a mask went from zero to very high.
If that had been the case from the start, I'll bet masks would be reusable routinely.
So I think what we're seeing is that there was a blind spot, just guessing, right?
Don't reuse your mask because the cartoonist said it's safe, right?
That would be dumb. But I'm speculating that what we had was a massive cognitive blind spot About reuse of some types of masks, not all of them.
I think it makes a difference what brand you have and what model.
But that some of them could be reused with relatively little problem.
You know, hang it on a clothesline for three days, or you spray it with some Lysol or something disinfectant, let it dry out.
There probably were a number of ways to reuse them, but we're cognitively blind to that even being an option because we've always thrown them away.
And that was always considered the safest thing.
So I think it's just a cognitive thing, and we may be...
Basically, if we get past that, maybe you quadruple the number of N95 masks just by the realization that they can be reused under the right conditions.
So that's good news.
All right. So Schumer and...
Pelosi, or I guess Schumer tweeted this out, and as the reason he killed, it was part of killing the legislation, for the bailouts or whatever it is, he says the GOP bill is a slush fund to bail out Trump hotels.
Full stop. Senator Schumer, you are not worthy of leading us in this thing.
The very first sentence of why he killed this thing is that it would be good for Trump hotels.
I'm kind of done with you, Senator Schumer.
there.
This wasn't really the time for that.
Because here's the thing, and I'm going to go a little bit stronger on this.
If you're saving other businesses, other hotels...
You damn well ought to save the Trump Hotel.
Trump hotels, Trump business.
You damn well ought her.
Because what did the Trump family do to you?
Not talking about President Trump.
He's turned over management and he's a certain age.
But what did Ivanka do to you?
That a business she's associated with doesn't get to live and the employees that work there don't get to have their jobs?
What did she do to you?
What did Don Jr., what did Eric Trump, you know, obviously everybody's political and everybody's insulting each other, but what have they done as citizens that makes you want to carve them out for special destruction economically?
Not acceptable.
Absolutely not acceptable.
Chuck Schumer, if you're picking winners and losers for political reasons, and you said it clearly, I mean, it's right there, it's in his tweet, the very first sentence, The GOP is a slush fund to bail out Trump hotels.
Now, I assume what he means is that some of that money could be used and would expect to be used to bail out Trump hotels as well as other hotels.
Do you have a problem with that?
I don't. Now, of course, I want to see the numbers.
I want to make sure that saving the hotel business is, you know, a good use of the money compared to whatever else they could use the money for, assuming there's some limitation on how much money is available.
You know, I'd like to see the reasoning.
But if you're going to be looking at saving other hotels because the recreational and, you know, Tourist business is so important to the United States.
It's a real big part.
It's a big, big, big thing.
Why would you exclude the Trump hotels?
I mean, really, you flew across the country to tell us you're going to be political in a time of a crisis?
This is so unacceptable.
So deeply unacceptable, Chuck Schumer.
You are not worthy. You're just not worthy.
You know, almost every citizen is taking...
Not almost. Every citizen, 100% of citizens are sacrificing.
Right now. Do you think that we want to see you tweeting about your politics?
About, oh, I can't make the Trump hotels happy.
You know, I don't want to accidentally do something that's good for the Trump family.
And really, that's the first line of your tweet?
This is not acceptable.
This is not worthy.
This is not worthy of the sacrifice the public is making.
You need to increase your game.
Would I listen to an argument that says we want to fix this with these tweaks?
Yeah, absolutely. If Democrats have an argument that says if we tweak this, we can solve a problem that wasn't anticipated, sure.
No problem. But is that...
Is that stated in the GOP as a slush fund to bail out the Trump hotels?
That is literally mind reading.
That is mind reading.
Somebody is imagining they can see other people's intentions.
Now, do I think that President Trump wants to save the Trump business?
And do I think that the people who work with him in the government would be highly biased toward doing that?
I do. I do.
But you know what else is true?
We'll probably need to save some hotels.
And he's one of them.
So if he can come up with a reason why he doesn't need to be on the list, meaning the business, not him, I'm open to it.
I'll listen to it, but I certainly don't see that reason.
It just looks like naked politics to me, so you're going to have to do better than that because you just have to do better.
And then he goes on and says that About other businesses that got a $2 trillion tax cut last year.
When Schumer is saying that the businesses that might be helped by this also got a $2 trillion tax cut last year, that's not a reason.
That's just naked politics.
Because it's a sunk cost.
The sunk cost is what we did last year.
You can't take it back.
It's what happened. It's done.
So Schuber comes into town to tell us that he's going to make a decision based on a sunk cost.
I've taught you what a sunk cost is.
By definition, a sunk cost is something that should be ignored for your decisions today.
Because it's something you can't change.
It's just history. It's something in your mind.
It's something in the past.
You can't time travel.
So if you're making decisions based on something that happened in the past that can't be changed as your justification, that's a sunk cost.
It's the most basic leadership mistake to make a decision based on a sunk cost.
And he's telling you he's doing it.
He's telling you. I'm not telling you.
He's telling you that that's a big part of his decision.
It's in his first sentence.
It's a sunk cost.
That is not worthy. You are not worthy of our sacrifice.
You need to up your game.
Naval Ravikant tweeted around, and anything he tweets is worth looking at because he's a fantastic curator of what your brain needs and when.
And it was an article, the title of at least a pull quote from it is, so this was the intention of the article, That we should pay almost anything, almost any price, to shorten the shutdown, even if it costs 100 times what the Manhattan Project cost in those dollars.
And it goes on to say that the enormous trillions of dollars of damage have their own expense.
People die when the economy does poorly, etc.
It might make sense to go back to work because the economic shutdown, if we calculated it smartly, we would see that it's much worse than potentially the deaths.
Here's what's missing. No mention of the strategy of using the hydroxychloroquine.
There was no discussion in this article About the more reasonable middle ground, which is once you can get the deaths down to zero for the healthy people, not the over-60s.
But if you can get the young people death rate down to zero, you've got to path out.
Send them back to work in some phased way.
Monitor the situation.
Keep everybody alive. Yeah, you might have to cough for a week and stay quarantined, but we've got lots of people.
We're not short of people to work.
I mean, the big problem is unemployment.
So... We can take the sacrifice and get this done.
So, if you read an article like that, and you are fooled into thinking that the economic destruction of continuing this is far greater in even death count than just going with the virus, look for this variable.
What does it say about the strategy of using the hydroxychloroquine to keep the young people at least alive, at least alive, And turn it into a cold, basically, and they miss some work, maybe.
But the option is missing.
So you could scare yourself to death about the economic turndown by looking at the comparison without the advantage of the drug variable being in there.
And then here's the thing.
I think that pausing for two weeks is always going to be seen as the right decision.
Because Not too many things break in two weeks.
Not too many people who lose two weeks of income are going to be disadvantaged for years.
That would be rare, right?
If all you've lost is two weeks of income, you can grind it back after a year or so.
You'll be back on your feet.
So two weeks makes perfect sense.
And then that's where judgment comes in after that.
After the second week, and the President said he's going to make a decision, I think the decision is going to be a request.
And I think the request is going to be, I'm going to ask you to take an even bigger sacrifice and risk with your health, maybe your lives.
You know, we think the pill will keep you alive, but maybe with your life.
To get the economy going, and I believe that the citizens of this country will rise as one and say yes.
The Dow losing $1,000 per day on average.
Yeah, you know, the beauty of owning stock is that if the entire Dow Jones goes down by 20%, you still own about the same amount of the country.
So the percentage of the economic engine that you owned two weeks ago, let's say you owned some stock in your 401k, you owned whatever tiny percentage of the total economy you owned in stocks.
You still own about the same percent because everybody else went down with you.
And I always forget that if you have a background in economics, things can look less scary than it can to people who don't.
Your buying power It didn't change as much as the percentage that your stocks went down, because now we're all in the same boat.
In theory, if the stocks went down and just stayed there, which isn't going to happen, that's not going to happen.
But in theory, so too with the price of real estate, so the amount you add to your 401k, Would go further.
Your rent would go down, etc., if the economy gets depressed.
Now, I'm oversimplifying and I'm not expecting things to play out cleanly.
I'm just saying that I wouldn't worry too much if everybody in the stock market has less dollar amount.
We still have the same percentage.
When it goes back up, you'll still have the same percentage.
And in the long, long run, the percentage of the economy you own is going to be the big thing.
Once you're over, you know, survival level.
Yeah, gas prices are down, that helps.
Yep. So, stock market going down today?
No, that variable gives me no concern.
None. Not a single concern.
Because remember, I told you a week ago that the next two weeks are going to look worse.
So, if the next two weeks go exactly the way I predicted, I don't feel less comfortable because I'm also predicting that after that we're going to start the turn back.
So as long as my predictions have been spot on, I'm also feeling a little bit comfortable about the ones after that that have not been confirmed, and so should you.
All right. Stock market will bounce back quickly.
Yeah, the stock market just needs to know that things are directional.
Directionally improving. So I would expect when the president gives his announcement about his decision, that if any of it is to go back to work, the stock market will respond.
Time to fix the tests.
Yeah, it looks like there's something brewing with the technology of testing.
Because right now it's a clunky, time-consuming process.
And the President seemed to suggest that somebody had invented a streamlined way to do it.
Some kind of a 45 minutes you get your results kind of a test.
I don't know what that looks like.
And I don't know how quickly we could ramp up production of such a thing.
But it's promising.
Isolation is devastating.
Oh, speaking of isolation, so one of the problems that Congress can't seem to solve, and it's just mind-boggling to me, here's the problem that Congress hasn't been able to solve, that you have to be present to vote.
And it makes a big difference if people are self-quarantining and the two sides are kind of close to each other in numbers.
It makes a big difference If you can't show up Because I thought to myself,
well, why can't you just send one person to vote?
And then just agree that you'll vote offline, and then just tell that one person, okay, the Democrats won the vote, or the Republicans won the vote, but whatever it is, that one person would go in and then safely, without being around other people, just vote. However, the people sitting at home told them to vote.
But that doesn't work. Because the Constitution requires, you know, you get enough bodies in the room.
But here's what I would like to test.
We have an emergency and we can test this.
Let's do this. For every person who can't make it physically, how about they have an iPad?
So you have somebody come in and say, here's Senator Lee's iPad.
Here's Senator Rand Paul's iPad.
Put it in the room, turn it on to FaceTime, and they're live, but they're on video.
And I think you have to push a button to vote, so maybe somebody sitting next to them can push their button, and they can observe it, so there's no funny business.
So here's the thing.
If you attend and vote live on video, have you met the constitutional requirement to be there in person?
Well, no, right?
Obviously, no. What happens if you do it anyway?
Remember, it's emergency rules.
We're under crisis rule, and the old rules are all flexible now.
What if you just said, it's an emergency, if you appear on a video device, we will count you as present.
We'll change that rule if we have to later, but for the moment...
If you're live on video in the room, you're present.
Now, what would happen?
Well, maybe somebody takes it up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says, you know, it's our job to, you know, interpret the Constitution and sure, we're originalists and we don't want to deviate from the exact word of the Constitution, but let me ask you this.
What are the exact words of the Constitution?
I don't know. Maybe somebody could tell me.
But I'm sure it says something like, you have to be there in person.
But here's what your Supreme Court can do for you.
No, that's not the coronavirus.
Don't worry. Here's what you could do.
The Supreme Court could say that what it means to be in person when the Constitution was written is It just doesn't look like that anymore because they couldn't contemplate that you could move yourself into another space virtually by being on a device.
So the framers didn't think of that option, so it was never contemplated.
Could the Supreme Court, I know you don't like them making legislation from the bench, but could they interpret the Supreme Court to simply say, yeah, it's 2020.
Being somewhere in person Could easily just be on a video device, because it beats all the requirements of being in the room in terms of communication, right?
Am I wrong that we could just do it, you know, just replace people with iPads, vote as if they're in person, Take it to the Supreme Court.
And what if the Supreme Court, you know, doesn't take it or whatever?
Well, who cares? Because the American people could watch the whole process.
Remember, this is fully transparent.
If you're at home watching Rand Paul vote, you know, and you're watching at home on TV, and you see his iPad say, I vote I, and then whoever's sitting there pushes his, you know, I button or however it works, I don't know, and you're watching it, it's fully transparent.
Are you going to be the dick who says, oh no, the Constitution says you've got to be there in person, Rand Paul.
Well, that's not good enough for me.
No, you're not. You're not.
You're not going to be that dick.
You're going to say, yeah, I mean, it's an emergency.
Why wouldn't you? Makes perfect sense.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court, do you think the Supreme Court's going to be a bunch of dicks and just say, ah, technically, technically, you've got to be physically in that room.
So, no. No, we're going to let the whole country go to hell Because a couple hundred years ago, they didn't know that FaceTime would be invented.
No, nobody's going to do that.
Just fix it.
Just fix it, Congress.
Your public will support you.
Just make it visible.
Make it transparent. Don't have any secrets about who's voting and why, who's home, who's there.
No secrets. Your country will support you.
100%. And if there's anybody who wants to be a dick about it later and say, oh, that wasn't a valid vote because you did not have the actual physical bodies in the seats, well, just ignore that idiot.
I mean, there's always going to be one of those.
Just ignore them. And if he wants to take it to the Supreme Court, fine.
Fine. I think the Supreme Court is going to say, yeah, FaceTime's fine in an emergency.
That's what I think. All right.
I think I talked about everything I want to talk about.
Let's make sure. Just checking my notes.
Bear with me, please. Bear with me.
Oh, I'll mention again the website.
If you spun up a factory to try to make protective gear for doctors, say masks or gowns or gloves or whatever, and you're trying to find the buyers, go to this website, projectn95.com.
Project and then N95, the type of masks.com, but they're doing more than just masks.
But they will match people who are making stuff, just sort of on their own.
They said, we can make these, and started making them with the people, the hospitals, and the buyers.
So that was worth saying.
All right, I think I hit my notes.
I will be back...
This after, or sometime tonight.
I'll shoot for the same time in the evening.
So, if you saw that, if you're seeing this at 7 a.m.
California time, I'll do 7 p.m.
tonight, or I'll shoot for it.
Can't promise it. Alright, that's all I've got for now.
