All Episodes
Previous Next
March 26, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
42:58
Episode 873 Scott Adams: Coffee Now. Stat.

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Coronavirus, medical professionals and #TrumpPills #TrumpPills = less ventilators needed What/where are the raw materials needed for #TrumpPills? Where are those raw materials currently going? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Alexa, turn on studio.
Hey, there I am.
A little sideways. Let's see if I can fix that.
Way much better.
If you don't mind, I'm a little bit behind.
So while you're streaming in here, while you're streaming in here, let me print out my notes, if you don't mind.
It'll only be a minute. Bear with me.
Talk among yourselves. All right.
While we're waiting for those to print, we've got something else to do.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Yes, it is. And all you need is a cup or a 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 dopamine hit of the day, the This is the unparalleled pleasure, the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It's medicinal.
Go! Let's fix that lighting.
Let's fix this lighting.
Hold on. Let's fix that.
And grab my notes.
This is the part of the show that you usually don't see.
That's because I'm usually a little more organized.
Now, for those of you who have been joining me in the morning and in the evening, two hours a day of live programming, you're probably saying to yourself, gosh, Scott, you must be pretty busy producing two hours of live entertainment every day, plus a comic strip.
And the answer is, You have no idea how busy I am.
Let me tell you this.
There's a public situation going on with everything that's going on with the coronavirus in the world.
And then there's your private situation.
You know, the things that you're all doing in your homes to stay safe.
But there's a whole other world out there of stuff that's happening that...
You know, in some cases you'll find out about a little bit later.
But, oh my God, the things I've learned and the things I've been involved with in the last few days, I'll never really be able to talk about them.
But the world is a magical place.
The world is a magical place.
That's all I can tell you.
All right. Let's start out by, if anybody's new here, this is not bragging.
This is just for the new people.
The people who have been with me for a while know that I always talk about which predictions I got right and which ones I got wrong, because you need to know.
Should you believe my predictions?
Should you not? Should you put a percentage of likelihood on them?
And the same with everybody else.
So everybody should be checking their predictions.
Especially with this COVID-19 situation, because we all made a lot of predictions.
And you need to, every now and then, just stop back and say, okay, who is getting it mostly right and who wasn't?
Because that should tell you a little bit about the odds of who's going to get it right the next time.
So that's the purpose of talking about the predictions.
It's not bragging by itself, although it has that benefit.
Number one, who told you to close the airports and flights from China?
Probably I'm the first person you heard say that.
And I said that before I even knew it was a thing.
I didn't even know you could close the airport.
I mean, physically you can, of course.
But I didn't actually think it was even in the top ten possibilities.
When I first started screaming about it and using profanity on Periscope saying, close the airports.
And then we did. Some people told you that hospitals would not be crashed because it's just the flu.
I told you that they would.
We're already seeing hospital after hospital right on the edge.
So I would say all the people who said, yes, this will be a problem for the healthcare system were right.
All the people who said, eh, it's just like the flu.
If the flu doesn't overrun our hospitals, why won't those?
All of those people, I think at this point we can say, were completely wrong and in a fairly dangerous way.
Not fairly. They were wrong in an extraordinarily dangerous way.
Because if we had not paid attention to it, we would not have flexed up as soon as we did.
We could always do it sooner. Who told you that the supply chains would be crushed?
And that that might be the bigger problem.
Mike Cernovich. I don't remember where I was in terms of at what point I started to agree with him, but he's the first person who sounded the alarm.
And there are a lot of people watching this who have to be thankful they got their toilet paper, right?
Because they were listening to Mike.
Mike has a very long track record of being not just right, but being able to look around corners.
I mean, he's not just right about what's straight ahead.
He's right about what's straight ahead and around the corner and down the alley.
I mean, if you're not following him, it's just crazy at this point.
Who told you that masks do work even when the experts were telling you they did not?
Well, I'm one of them.
Naval was saying it.
Probably lots of people, I don't mean to be You know, mentioning everybody who said it.
But everybody who said that they don't work, they were wrong.
Right? And now all the studies are coming out.
We can see, oh yeah, it totally works.
Not only do masks work, but you'd be better off with a bandana over your face than none at all.
So all the people who said, of course they work.
How could they not work?
You know, you could argue about the efficiency and stuff, but it works a little.
I mean, if your cough Is what's causing people to get sick?
How in any world does suppressing the thing that goes out and makes people sick, how could that make it not better?
It just didn't make any sense from the start.
So all the people who said masks don't work, you should never listen to them again.
Who's the first person who said to you, the meds work, but we probably have a shortage problem, and that's why you're not hearing so much about them?
In the entire world, of all the people talking about COVID-19, a lot of them, who was the first person who told you...
I wasn't the first person to say the meds could be good.
I am the first person who told you the meds are good and you're being lied to to control hoarding.
Right? Now that's just a fact.
We don't have to wonder about that anymore.
So the different states, Nevada...
And I think New York City, if not the state, I forget.
But they're already putting controls on the drug for hoarding.
And India, which makes a lot of it, has closed export.
And it looks like the pill is the game.
The pill is the game.
Somebody was saying that we should have planned better to have more ventilators.
And if we'd started earlier, we'd be ahead of the game.
But ventilators are largely...
The thing you do because you didn't have the pills.
At least you didn't have them in the people in time.
If you had enough pills and you gave them to people as soon as they presented symptoms, the number of them that would ever need a ventilator is small, based on what we've seen so far.
So, there's that.
Alright, who told you that even though it seemed unlikely, that very quickly because of the six degrees of separation thing, you would start to know people Or have some connection to a lot of people who are getting it.
Have you noticed that already?
I think there are 60,000 people in a country of 350 million who allegedly have been exposed.
How many do you know?
I already know 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
I think I know 5 people who have it or probably have it.
At this point, and that's not even counting the celebrities I know.
The news today is that Kathy Griffin is in the hospital with something pretty nasty, and at least based on the symptoms, it could be this, but she can't get a test.
That's right. Kathy Griffin can't get a test.
I mean, in a timely manner.
She can get it eventually. So I don't think she's being treated, and she could die right in front of us.
I mean, it could happen if she's not getting the treatment.
So, I mean, that would just be the worst thing in the world.
So we're seeing the six degrees of separation coming true, as I told you.
Who was the first person who told you that when we go back to work, it'll be a phased approach based on statistics for different people with different risks?
Probably me, right?
Now, after the government says that's what they're going to do, you say to yourself, oh, yeah, it's kind of obvious in retrospect.
You wouldn't just send everybody back with different risk profiles.
You'd segregate them.
So who told you that first?
That was me. Who's been hammering on the importance of decoupling from China?
Quite a few people.
I'm not like the person who started it.
But among your world, where did you hear it loudest and most?
Where did you hear the word decouple the most?
Probably from me. From earliest and loudest, among people you probably follow.
Kyle Bass is louder.
Gordon Chang is louder.
But it's more likely you follow me than them.
I would say that the world has come around to, oh yeah, decoupling is not crazy cartoonists yelling about stuff.
Decoupling is what you absolutely have to do.
There's no question about it.
Who told you that human ingenuity during this crisis would be mind-boggling and that it would be the biggest variable that can't be predicted?
That was me. Now again, if it sounds like I'm saying I'm the only person in the world who thought this was happening, nothing like that's happening.
I assume that for every opinion I had, there were a million people or more who had the same opinion, but you might not have been following them, you might not have heard them, they might not have a platform like this.
So I'm not magic.
I'm just telling you that if you're following people who made all the wrong predictions, maybe rethink that.
Here are some human ingenuity things, just a little sample of it.
Dyson... The company that makes the vacuum cleaners and other things, hand dryers and stuff.
They designed and built an entirely new ventilator called the Covent in 10 days.
Dyson, the founder, is sort of a genius inventor, and their company is well designed for prototyping and rapidly building stuff.
That's what they do. In 10 days, they designed and built Their own ventilator.
Now you've seen a bunch of stories about somebody made one for like a hundred bucks, you know, from parts and somebody else showed you how you could do it with this part and that part.
So the human ingenuity that's going into just the ventilators It's just incredible.
Just that one little area, and then you look at the creativity and ingenuity that's going into making masks and sourcing them.
It's incredible.
It's just incredible.
We're going to learn so much about this, learn about how to work with each other, learn how to make new stuff, learn how to do things in a crisis.
Our human learning is off the charts.
The number of people who cross-pollinated, the experts who had to talk to each other, it's really incredible.
Who told you that it's more likely at least some of us will go back to week in weeks, not months?
That was me. I think it's going to be somewhere in between weeks and months, but I was telling you it would be on the lower end, largely because I had some optimism about the pills, which we do not have in quantity yet.
I also am predicting that the recovery will be fast once it starts.
So that one you can wait for, but that one will be right.
And here's my, if I can say so, I think my most precise prediction was that I said two days ago that you should see in the next 48 hours, which is the last two days, the death rate in New York start to level off and maybe drop and start turning back towards zero.
And the hypothesis was that they now had enough of the Trump bills, the hydroxychloroquine, etc., that it would start making a difference in their death rate.
And I need this confirmed, but I feel as though the death rate was going up, up, up, and that actually in the last two days, the rate of increase just fell off sharply.
So I believe it's still going up, but the slope just bent.
That's exactly what I told you would happen within a 48-hour period, based on a specific reason, the meds coming in, and it looks like it happened.
Now, I need a fact check on that, because easily today it could be opposite.
You have to watch every day on these things.
But I think I'm right about that.
So that's a good sign. So yesterday, you know, I always talk about this simulation winking at me.
And there's one TV show called Modern Family that whenever I turn that on, I swear to God, it looks like they looked at my life and then they wrote a script about all the little things that were bugging me and they put it in the show.
Curb Your Enthusiasm does the same thing.
Now that's not what's happening.
It's just that the writers are good at finding those little parts of life that people don't talk about but we're all feeling.
So great writing is what's really behind it.
But I turned on the TV last night to try to forget about the COVID virus thing.
I spent all day, between the times that you see me publicly here doing this, I'm working all day.
I mean, I'm working hard at trying to connect people, figure stuff out, advise people, move things along.
There's just a ton happening under the hood that you'll never know about, but there's a lot of energy happening when you're not watching.
But I wanted to get that out of my mind before bed, so I just randomly picked a show I recorded.
It was a Modern Family episode from, I don't know, weeks ago, well before the crisis.
And I turned it on and there's a scene there with one of the characters saying that somebody had done something to deny malaria pills to doctors.
So now doctors wouldn't have enough malaria pills.
And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, did I just spend my entire day worried about doctors not having access to malaria pills?
And then I turned on the only TV show I turned on.
It wasn't like I watched TV all day, except for the news.
I watched it all day. But it's the only entertainment I had that day.
And I turned it on, and the character is making fun of somebody who did something which would have some effect on the supply of malaria pills to doctors.
And I'm thinking, now, of course, I know it's a coincidence.
I'm not saying it's magic.
But what a mind-boggler that was.
Speaking of innovation, I keep hearing story after story about the technology for rapidly testing for the virus is improving in a whole bunch of places.
So now you have the home test, which is probably being limited by the FDA still, I think.
So you've got the home test.
You've got the one in the office that you can get a result in 45 minutes.
Somebody else is working on one that gives you something in half an hour.
South Korea now has in the field a phone booth sized testing device that you walk in there and get tested.
Now, this is just me.
But if you said, hey, we've got this phone booth sized thing, go in there and you can administer the test.
The first thing I'm going to say to myself is, you mean the phone booth sized thing That every infected person in Seoul has just walked into to get tested?
That's the tiny little space that you would like me to go into next to get tested?
No thank you. No thank you.
Maybe I'll test at home. But I'm sure the South Koreans have figured that out, so I doubt there's a real risk.
But psychologically, I would not go in a phone booth immediately after somebody who was also testing to see if they had a deadly disease.
That's just me. Here's a question I asked.
I said, if following FDA guidelines, and the context here is giving people the hashtag Trump pills, if you're new, that's the hydroxychloroquine.
So if doctor gives somebody the pills and the FDA says don't do that, Now, the FDA is not saying it's unsafe.
The FDA is putting a gating factor on it, obviously, because of the shortage.
So you should not look at the FDA in this context as being dumb old bureaucrats who just can't get out of the way.
It looks like the FDA is intentionally slowing it down by saying that it has to be used in a hospital clinical setting.
Obviously, that's because of shortage.
Because those are the critical places.
So let's say the FDA says, doctor, you regular doctor in your regular practice, you should not, according to the FDA, you cannot prescribe this drug to somebody who just has symptoms but has not been tested.
What does the doctor do in that situation?
Well, of course, the doctor oath is do no harm.
You can't harm somebody.
So you're a doctor, and in your hand you're holding...
This is figurative.
You know, they would have to write a prescription for it.
But let's say you lived in a town where they're not out of it yet.
There are some towns where they're not out of it.
You're a doctor, you've got this pill in your hand, and you are almost positive that it's the right thing to do because the side effects are minimal, the risk is gigantic, the cost of the drug is 20 bucks.
Of course you're going to give it to your patient.
Of course.
And in fact, every doctor who actually has access to the drug is doing just that.
So basically 100% of doctors, in my opinion, can't verify this, but in my opinion, 100% of doctors are prescribing the drug to people who just have symptoms and no test, even though the FDA is saying don't do that.
Now, here's my question.
Suppose the FDA came later and said, hey, you violated a guideline.
We're going to yank your medical license.
I don't know. Who knows if that's even a thing.
I don't know how the process works.
But let's say it is a thing.
What defense would the doctor have?
Well, two defenses.
One defense, and apparently this has been used in other contexts before, is that it's a necessity.
So you can do something that's against the law if it's also a necessity to save someone's life or attempt to save someone's life.
So as long as it's a necessity and your intentions are clean and the reasoning is clean and at least everything about what you're doing is clean, nobody's doubting why you're doing it or what you're doing it, you can break the law.
If you're saving a life.
You know, it's some dumb law that didn't anticipate this situation sort of thing.
So you got that defense.
But I would say the greater defense doesn't need a court.
The greater defense is, I'm a doctor.
That should be a complete defense.
Because the doctors we entrust to make hard decisions that are risky for the patient, but also risky for the doctor.
Right? If a doctor makes a mistake, that's now free.
So the doctor's got a lot of skin in the game.
A lot of skin in the game.
That's who you want. You want somebody who's got a lot of risk with you.
Same kind of risk in the same domain.
And here's my defense for any doctor who prescribes it against FDA deadlines.
Do no harm. Do no harm.
If you know that not giving it to somebody is going to cause them harm or probably, you sort of have to do it.
So I would say that the ethical requirements of being a doctor are very clear in this situation.
And in fact, that's why doctors are acting that way, as you would hope.
All right. I've said before, and I'll say it again, I keep hearing people say people are prescribing it to their family members and medical professionals are effectively hoarding it for themselves.
Now, I wouldn't want them to overhoard But nonetheless, it is true that the medical professionals are the most important people because if they stay healthy, there's a multiplier effect of the people that they can help.
But I would argue that their families cannot be separated from that equation.
You can't expect your doctor to go to work and work his 18-hour day if he thinks his wife is dying back at the house because she doesn't have a prescription.
And you could just easily write that prescription and save your spouse's life.
It's just... It's just not reasonable to separate the professionals who can have the meds from their spouses and immediate families and say, well, they can't.
If you want the medical professionals to be effective, you've got to treat that as a team, unfortunately.
I mean, maybe you don't want that to be true, but I think it's the smartest thing to do statistically.
Likewise, we just heard that A member of the squad, Ayanna Presley.
Apparently she's also got some symptoms.
They're in Massachusetts and can't get a test.
So like everybody else, she has to wait for a test while she has symptoms.
This will be unpopular with you, but I think she should go to the front of the line.
I think Congress, you know, first responders, Congress, Medical professionals, their families, I do think they need to be top priority.
Because again, it's a leverage thing.
Yeah, yeah, you don't like Ianna Presley's politics.
I get that. I get that.
But you need the Congress at least to be on the ball.
So I think Congress should go to the front of the line.
As a citizen, I would support that, even at my own risk.
I think that's the better choice.
Let's see, what else we got here?
So I tweeted, if anybody knows this, I'm looking for somebody in the state of Texas, so an actual Texan who lives there, not a Texan.
Not somebody who knows one, but I want to hear from an actual Texan who's had this experience.
So they've had symptoms of the coronavirus, and the doctor We're looking for a test case.
So give me a test case of a Texan who had coronavirus symptoms, went to a doctor, the doctor prescribed the meds, but the pharmacy wouldn't give it to him because of FDA rules.
If you can give me an example of a person, we will break the system.
It will help. A follower on Twitter said the following.
Growing up in Nigeria, I can't count the number of times I took chloroquine, which is a slightly weaker version of the hydroxychloroquine, because if you had a fever, that's what the doctor gave.
Only if you didn't recover did you get tested for anything.
So in Nigeria, they would just hand them out like M&Ms if you had a fever, and if it didn't work, well, maybe we'll look into it.
In the United States, we're doing it backwards.
You have to have a test, or we can't give you the drugs.
Now, of course, the reason is that that requirement is to slow down, unfortunately, it's to slow down the access to the drug, obviously because of a shortage.
I saw a picture of the legislators in Congress working to try to pass the relief bill, which is Maybe some of the worst work that Congress has ever done in the history of Congress.
And I'm counting both Republicans and Democrats.
Because collectively, if they produce a bad product, as they did, you can't give any of them a pass.
They work together, and they succeed together, and they fail together, and they fail together this time.
Now, psychologically, maybe it didn't matter too much what the details were.
Psychologically, the economy needed this Stimulus.
It needed a fast. So it probably is more important that action happened than the details of the action.
So we probably ended up in the best of the bad choices.
The best choice was to do it quickly and smartly.
Well, we didn't give smartly.
That wasn't an option, apparently.
Our Congress can't give us smartly.
But they did give us kind of quick.
You know, it took a week longer than it should, but Things take long.
Time sometimes. So I think it was a horrible job and they all get failing grades and they should all lose their jobs.
But action is better than no action.
So I think the markets responded and it'll end up positive even though it's a complete abomination.
But here's the thing.
Somebody showed some pictures on Twitter of the legislators all standing too close together.
And I thought to myself, my God, really?
Congresses today, or last night, they're still bunching up in little groups?
When some of them are actually testing positive already and it's an emergency and we need them at their best, there was no way they could solve that.
It felt like Joe Biden not being able to figure out how to use his phone to livestream.
Didn't it feel like that?
It felt like we were watching a whole bunch of incompetent, bumbling people who couldn't get the most basic, basic element of life in 2020 right, which is stay the hell away from the other persons.
Really? You couldn't get that right?
I mean, your confidence in them has to drop when you see that.
Now, I get that it's an emergency, and they probably felt like they needed to be in the same room, but at least don't let any cameras in there.
At the very least, don't let somebody take a picture of it.
How are we supposed to feel confident?
Because that's important. You've got to feel confident in your leadership during a crisis.
How in the world do you feel confident about that?
When you watch these idiots...
I think that the entire game just came down to Trump pills and hydroxychloroquine.
If you're talking about the number of ventilators, it's because we don't have enough of the pills.
If we had the pills, at least anecdotally, all of the information suggests that the number of ventilators you need would plunge.
Like a lot. So do we have a ventilator shortage?
In some nominal sense, yes.
But we wouldn't have a shortage if we also had the pills.
So here's my question.
I said to myself, who makes these pills?
So we've got at least one, maybe two companies in the United States who, quote, make the pills.
Alright, one of them is, is it Novartis?
I forget who it is. So, probably didn't write that down.
So there's a company that's making the pills, and I was just reading up on them, and they said that they've got enough raw materials or supplies or whatever it is to make the pills, so they're going to press up 50 million pills or whatever it is and get them out there in the middle of April.
So we're probably A couple weeks away from at least one big producer producing them at scale.
And so I go to Wikipedia and I thought, okay, but what happens when they run out of that raw material?
Mylan, yes, thank you.
Mylan is the name of the company that I was trying to remember.
I think Novartis is doing something else similar.
I don't know. I saw Novartis on something I tweeted.
So what happens when my land or whoever else is making them domestically, what happens when they run out of the raw material?
And what is it?
What is the stuff you mix together to make these pills?
Is it a plant?
A mineral? An oil?
What the hell is it?
Can somebody just tweet that at me?
So here's what I'm getting at.
Should we be planting a whole bunch of some kind of plant?
Should we be making our heavy equipment go dig something out of the ground?
Where the hell does it come from?
And why don't we know that?
Isn't... Somebody says Viagra is a good substitute.
Well, I doubt that's true medically, but it would take your mind off of things.
You got that. You got that going for you.
Somebody's confirming that Novartis 2 is in that business.
Now, why can't I easily find that?
I spent only 60 seconds Googling it, but it should have been the top thing that came out.
Shouldn't the story be, there's a drug called this, it does these things, it's made by these companies, and they use the raw material X. What is the raw material?
What is it? Can anybody answer that question?
How are we at this point, when we don't even know what the raw material is, somebody says quinine, what the hell is that?
That's not an answer to my question.
Where does quinine come from?
Is there a lake of quinine somewhere?
Do you mine it? Does it come out of a plant?
I don't know. Somebody says it's synthetic.
But what's that mean?
Anything synthetic is still made out of stuff.
What's the stuff?
Somebody says hydrogen, oxygen, and chlorine.
Is that true? You sound like you know what you're talking about.
Uh... Yes, it's important that we have sourcing that is not controlled by other countries.
Somebody says... I'm looking at your comments.
I assume that most of them are wrong.
Somebody says it's some kind of tree bark.
Oh, actually, several people are saying it's from tree bark.
Okay. Question number two.
What kind of trees and where do they grow?
Because you can't really quickly grow some tree bark, can you?
Or can you clone it?
Could you clone tree bark?
Does that make sense? Can you clone tree bark?
I don't know. Somebody says it's the bark from the cinchona tree.
Well, suppose that's right.
Suppose it's the bark from the cinchona tree.
Where do they grow? I don't know if that's right, by the way.
It's just something I'm reading in the Comments.
So let's Google that.
Oh, it does look correct.
It's a genius of flowering plants.
So cinchona is a plant.
And what is it used for?
Where do cinchona...
And then somebody else says it's a tree.
It's native to the Andes and grown in South America, Indonesia, and Congo.
The dried bark of the trees is the source of quinine and other medicinal products.
So, do all the quinine, chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, do they all come out of the same tree bark?
Cinchona trees. Alright, so this gets me to my next point.
So the source of these are the Andes, and grown in South America.
I don't know specifically what country, but I'm going to ask a very adult question right now.
Are you ready? This is an adult question.
Children are just going to get mad.
So children, you should just sign out now.
Here's an adult question.
What is the military capability of the countries that are growing these trees?
See where I'm going?
Now, I believe these countries are sufficiently friendly with the United States that they wouldn't try to hurt us.
But they do have the supply that the entire world needs.
China's probably willing to pay for it.
Other countries are willing to pay for that bark.
It's in our backyard, if you imagine that all of the Americas are our backyard.
If our military, I'm just going to say it directly, If our military needs to secure the supply for this hemisphere, including South America, if we went down and stole the supplies from South America to use in North America, we should all be shot.
I mean, for that, that would be like a crime against humanity of the highest degree.
But, if there's enough of it in the Americas, and any of that stuff is going to another country outside of the Americas, isn't that a military question?
Should our marines actually be assembling off the shore of a friendly allied country just to make sure that they're not shipping this drug outside of the Americas?
Right? Somebody says, stop.
Stop. Do not suggest military action.
It's an adult question.
I'm not saying what we should do.
What I'm saying is it's a military issue.
If we're looking at millions of deaths in this hemisphere, because that supply that has grown in this hemisphere is being shipped to another hemisphere, isn't that a homeland security problem?
Isn't that a military problem?
Now, of course, of course, the first stage of this is you contact the suppliers, if it's Peru, whoever it is, and you say, hey Peru, can we keep this in the Americas?
And Peru says, absolutely, we're not going to send this outside of, you know, North America, South America.
Don't need to, don't want to, plenty of demand.
So the first choice is you work productively with allies and there should be no military anything, right?
But how much do you think another country in another part of the world would be willing to pay to get that supply and take it away from the Americas?
How much would they be willing to pay for that?
A lot, right?
So the price that some Peruvian company could charge for a truckload of this tree bark just went through the roof.
So could we guarantee that the people who run the factories, even if the governments are friendly to us, even if the governments say yes, even if the governments say, oh yeah, we would never ship this out of the country.
But what about the factory, the farmer, whoever is stripping the trees?
Can you trust that guy?
Because he's going to get some big offers Well, here's my thing.
Can you trust the Peruvian army?
And here I'm just using Peru as a stand-in country.
It's nothing about Peru. It's just wherever they're growing this supply.
Can you trust the Peruvian military to not take a bribe?
Nope. No.
Now, in South America, you cannot trust anybody, really, not to take a bribe.
So if China says, hey, if you ship us a few trucks to that tree bark, we'll grease your pockets, politicians in Peru, military leaders in Peru.
Well, what's going to happen?
Well, if South America is South America and it hasn't changed lately, people take bribes.
So, if you're in America, and it might be a million lives on the line, and the only thing that could protect you is that a South American you could trust to not take a bribe, Is that the risk you want to take?
I'm just saying, if we're not already assembling troops to at least be in the general vicinity of where that tree bark is, and again, I might be completely wrong about that being the only source.
Maybe there's so much of this tree everywhere that we don't need any of this.
So, I have to be wildly fact-checked.
To make sure any of this makes any sense.
So don't take any of it too seriously.
I'm only going to put out one point that I will die on.
So here's the hill I'm going to die on.
If we have sources, the raw material sources for this Trump pills, and we're not at least putting a military presence around them, no matter who controls them, if it's in our domain, our sphere of influence, even though it's not our country...
It's a military thing, isn't it?
Am I wrong? That the adult thing to do would say, well, I can't rely on a Peruvian not to take a bribe, so let's make sure we get that tree bark our way.
Alright, somebody says calcium phosphate is also in it.
I assume that's a mining problem, right?
So there might be a little tree bark.
There might be something that needs to be mined, but from where?
Mules are switching from coke to quinine.
Yeah, that may be. Scott acts as if our government has our best interests in mind.
They don't. Well, you know, during a crisis, most of them do, but you're right.
There are going to be a lot of partisans who are just trying to improve their situation.
It says trees are not needed for the synthetic stuff.
So that would be an important thing to fact check.
So somebody's saying you don't need the tree if you're doing it synthetically, but does the synthetic one work?
Is it exactly the same?
Is there any base chemicals that we're short of to make it synthetically?
Because that's made of something, too.
Just because it's synthetic doesn't mean you don't need base materials.
Oh, now somebody's saying it doesn't come from trees.
Somebody says they think you can synthesize it.
All right, so the question then goes to, if you can synthesize it, and of what?
And is the thing you synthesize from it also in short demand?
Do we have it in our hemisphere?
Can we protect it militarily?
So my only point is, the military needs to protect our sources.
All right. And somebody says, I'm barking up the wrong tree.
Not bad. Not bad.
Yeah, other people, it seems, are weighing in.
A lot of people are saying you don't need trees.
You can synthesize it.
I don't know what that means.
I'm not a chemist.
So I'd need to know more about what you're synthesizing it from.
Somebody who seems smart says chloroquine is not a derivative of quinine.
So maybe all of this is just wrong.
So let me not believe anything I see in the comments.
So I'm only making a general statement.
So erase in your mind anything I said about Peru and anything I said about tree bark.
Those are not important to the point.
The point is that there may be a shortage, there may be some base materials, and if we're not protecting them militarily, we should.
That's all. So whether it's synthesized or true, same point.
Alright, that's what I've got for now.
I need to get back to work.
We've got a world to save.
I think we're on the right track now.
▲
Export Selection