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March 27, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:10
Episode 875 Scott Adams: Get in Here for the Sip. It's a Good One Today!

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Who's side is the WHO on, are they pro-virus? Boris Johnson has coronavirus #TrumpPills raw materials and Venezuela's Maduro Robert Barnes asks, where are the hospitals that are over-capacity? Rep Thomas Massie, sole holdout against actual vote --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Time Text
Hey everybody!
Come on in. Grab a chair.
Get a beverage. Some of you are exercising right now.
Good for you. Everybody who's exercising right now, when you listen to my voice, you're doing exactly the right thing.
We need you healthy. Stay healthy.
Get your immune system up.
Do your part.
All right. Many of you are here already.
And so, hey, thanks Omar.
And so, it's time for the Simultaneous Sip.
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 vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the pandemic, better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip and it happens.
So, let's talk about all the things.
We'll talk about all the things.
Starting with...
So, I don't want to get ahead of myself.
Because, you know, I tend toward the optimistic scale of things.
So I'm going to put a little bit of a caveat on this, which is...
Kind of wait and see what happens today.
But as you know, I had been predicting that this week would be the week that we saw the death rate, not the infection rate, but the death rate in New York City flatten out.
And the prediction was based on the fact that they got a big supply of the Trump pills.
So the Trump pills are the hydroxychloroquine combined with the azithromycin and maybe zinc, depending.
And they got that big shipment.
Apparently they were starting to give it to people on Monday.
And I said that in the next 48 hours or so, you should see the death curve start to flatten at the same time, and this was the key to the prediction, that you would see the number of infections soar.
Now part of that is because of better testing, right?
But the other part, the bigger part probably is that it's just an infection, so of course there's more.
And we saw that. So yesterday the death rate was around 100-ish.
But the day before, the death rate was also about 100-ish.
Now keep in mind that, you know, the day that you start administering the drug, you still have a whole bunch of people who should have had it earlier.
So in theory, the first thing you should see is a flattening, because I don't know any kind way to finish this sentence, so just assume that I don't have bad intentions here.
But you have to kind of work through the backlog.
There's just no nice way to say it.
The backlog of people who aren't going to make it.
And for some of them, the medicines, even if they work, could be too late, especially for the elderly and the underlying conditions.
So what I would expect is a few days of flattening of the death rate, not the infection rate, that's still going way up.
But if the meds work to keep you alive and we have enough to give it to you early, maybe upon your first visit with symptoms instead of waiting until it's too late, I think, just to stay with the prediction, again, everything depends on Either the hydroxychloroquine or some combination.
It could be another med. But everything depends on some medicine working.
And they're probably doing enough testing there that they're getting a sense for that.
So, don't want to get ahead of myself, but I did call this days in advance.
And remember, I always tell you, Look for the people who make public predictions, and then tell you later if they got it right or wrong.
I will also tell you when I get stuff wrong, and I know you'll remind me if I forget.
But this one was right on.
This prediction was spot on.
I said this would be the week if flattened, and it did.
Now, that doesn't mean it's because of that.
So you still have to wait. That's why I don't want to get ahead of myself with any optimism.
But it is what I would expect.
In the best case scenario, which is that we have some therapeutics which really make a difference, that's the best case scenario, it would look exactly like this.
But it doesn't mean it is that.
The World Health Organization, I'm trying to figure out whose side they're on.
For a while, because they're human beings, I said to myself, well, it's humans against virus.
Obviously the humans are on my side.
It doesn't matter what country you're on, what party, what gender or ethnicity.
At the moment, we're kind of all on the same team against the virus.
But then I see, you know, but WHO is also saying that face masks were not that important at one point.
And there's a new tweet that says this.
This is from WHO, P-R-O, I don't know what the P-R-O stands for.
And it's a little public service announcement-looking thing, and it says, if you do not have any respiratory symptoms, such as a fever, a cough, or a run in your nose, you do not need to wear a medical mask.
When used alone, masks can give you a false sense of protection and can even be a source of infection when not used correctly.
To which I say, have we not been hearing the asymptomatic symptoms Shedding might be a big problem.
How do people who are not showing symptoms yet, how do they transition from not showing any symptoms to showing symptoms?
Does it ever pass through a moment or two of coughing before you put your mask on?
In other words, how do asymptomatic people Even theoretically, transmit the virus unless it's coming out of their mouth.
Is it coming out of their eyeball sockets?
Is that how asymptomatic people spread it?
Is it on their hands, but somehow it got to their hands without coming from their mouth or their nose?
Is that what the World Health Organization is telling us?
Does the asymptomatic spreading come out of your elbows?
I'm not a doctor.
But if I had to guess, asymptomatic spreading might come out of your ass a little bit, but probably it's coming out of your mouth and your nose.
At the very least, some people will just always be asymptomatic, but if they're spreading, where's it coming from?
You don't want to put a mask on those people?
Now, some people pointed out that countries who went mask crazy, in other words, they just all wore masks Such as Japan and South Korea also experienced a flattening of the curve far faster than anyone else.
Now, that's anecdotal, because there's lots of other things that are different comparing any two countries.
But you'd at least have to raise the question, since we know these masks stop people with symptoms, why wouldn't it stop people who are asymptomatic, but somehow they're shedding?
Or they're transitioning from asymptomatic to symptomatic.
Don't you want them to be wearing a mask during the transition?
So I don't think the World Health Organization is actually on our side.
I think the virus bought them off.
Somehow the virus managed to use cryptocurrency and bribe this organization.
That's all I can think of.
All right. So, people who are not good at thinking are having a real tough time with this crisis.
And when I say people who are not good at thinking, I'm talking about specifically two loser-think errors.
One is the thought that friction doesn't matter.
That it doesn't matter if you put some friction on something.
If it doesn't stop it completely, well, why do it?
And so I use this thought experiment...
Which some people reading it incorrectly believed was an analogy.
But it's a thought experiment.
You can see it as an analogy, but it's better as a thought experiment.
It goes like this. If all Americans were forced to go into a hot shooting war where there are actually bullets, and let's say there's no such thing as the military, where just all the citizens are going to be in a shooting war, And the government said, all right, since every single one of you are going to be in a war zone with actual bullets flying around, we're going to issue you bulletproof vests and helmets.
I think what we learned from the crisis is that 25% of the public would say, no thank you.
I know I'm going into a war zone with bullets flying everywhere.
But I don't need your bulletproof vest and I don't need your helmet because, duh, somebody could just shoot me in the neck.
So, what's the point?
Why would I need a bulletproof vest and a helmet in a war zone if somebody could just shoot me in the vest?
Duh! Duh!
So, now if you're saying Scott's against Scott, that's an analogy to wearing masks and And doing the smart things during a pandemic, to which I say, you can think of it as an analogy, but it doesn't have to be.
I just say it's a thought experiment for you to understand human beings.
25% of human beings don't understand that friction matters.
That reducing your risk even makes a difference.
So that's the point. It's a point about people.
It's not a point about masks or no masks.
But obviously, if masks can reduce your risk even a little bit in a pandemic, even just a little bit, of course you should be wearing them.
If the only thing it did, as Brian Machiavelli on Twitter pointed out this morning, if the only thing it did was keep you from touching your mouth, During the day a few times, it's still worth it if you have the masks.
Now, I think the real question might be availability of masks, but it seems like the one thing we could fix.
Maybe not N95 masks, but don't you think you could get the 75% effectiveness, just a fairly good job, mask for the public fairly quickly in a few weeks?
A lot of people are making them.
So I think we'll see a big difference when we get masks.
In addition to the virus crisis itself, we're having a major irony crisis.
I don't know if you're aware of it, because it kind of flies under the radar.
So my nose itches like crazy when I'm on camera now.
It's literally just an itch.
It's psychosomatic.
And I know it is. Like, I know it's psychosomatic, because the moment the camera turns off, this stops.
But right now it itches like crazy.
It's crazy. So the irony waves are coming hard now.
Some examples.
Mexico is paying for the wall in the virtual sense that they just moved their military up to guard the border so Americans can't get in.
I don't even have to say anything about that.
This is just on my list of the irony crisis.
It was announced today that Boris Johnson tested positive for coronavirus after Quite publicly bragging that he went and shook hands with coronavirus victims in the hospital, and he wasn't afraid about it at all.
And now he has the coronavirus.
There's some Instagram influencer type, I don't know how big she was, but it made a story in which she was bragging that she was not going to do social distancing.
And she tested positive for the coronavirus.
In the irony crisis further, we have some news that the southern part of the United States is unseasonably warm.
It's sort of a record heat for this time of year.
That's right. The only thing that might save us from the coronavirus, and I'm not even joking, this is a straight statement, global warming might save us.
Because remember, with the coronavirus, it's not about finding the switch where you turn it off.
It's about a whole bunch of different things that take a little bit of the edge off it and shrink and shrink and shrink it until the replication rate, the R factor, is below 1.
So if one person gives it to two people, you've got a pandemic.
But if one person only on average gives it to You know, 0.8 of a person, well then that's the beginning of the end of the pandemic.
So remember, we're just doing a whole bunch of little things to try to shrink that under one.
That's the game. It's not to get it to zero.
And I probably had some point I was going to make, but I forgot what it was.
All right. So I think it was yesterday.
Time is really compressed.
Are you having this experience?
Your experience of time passing is just all weird now.
I don't even know what day of the week it is half the time.
But I think it was yesterday when I tweeted that the press needs to tell us today, that was when I tweeted it, who makes this hydroxychloroquine drug, the Trump pills, and where do the raw materials come from, and what's the situation?
Do we have enough of it?
Is somebody making it? Is it an American source?
Is anything stopping it?
So those are the questions I asked.
I have to say I don't have the answers, but I have some information that will start filling in some context there.
Number one, the source, the base source for these chloroquine and quinine drugs and malaria drugs, and I don't know about hydroxychloroquine, but I think it might be derived also from a certain tree bark.
It's the cinchona tree and it is grown primarily in the Andes mountain range that stretches from on the west coast of South America all the way from, let's say, start from the bottom and the mountain range goes all...
it's a tropical forest basically.
Mountains and tropical forests all the way up to Venezuela.
Yeah, according to my map, Venezuela Unconfirmed.
But I'm just looking at the map and overlaying the country of Venezuela with the length of the tropical forest that has the base source for this drug.
It's not the only base source.
I'll talk about that. But is that a coincidence?
Is it a coincidence that we just put a price On Maduro's head, the United States just said $25 million to basically bring him in.
That's usually what we do before we kill a leader of another country, if we're being honest.
By the time we put a $25 million bounty on him, and I think he's being accused of drug trafficking, by the time we do that, we've decided to kill him.
Now, we don't know when, we don't know how, we don't know what that looks like, but the decision to kill him has been made.
Now, I praise the President and his advisors for making this decision exactly when they did.
It's a free punch.
It's a free punch.
Because under normal conditions, it would be a pretty risky proposition to take out the leader of another country, no matter the conditions.
It's a super risky play.
But today, is it?
If you heard today that Madura got taken out, and let's say America was behind it or even suspected to be behind it, if you heard that news today, how much would you care?
You wouldn't, right?
It actually wouldn't even make it to your bottom level of stuff you're caring about this week.
Under any normal week, if everything was going fine, it would of course be the biggest story.
It might rip apart the fabric of America, really questioning our values.
Is this a strategy?
What's this going to do? What are the unintended consequences of taking on a leader of another country?
You know that opens a can of worms.
It would be the biggest story in the world.
Except this week.
This week, we could just go and kill them.
And it would be a bee story somewhere down in the column.
And by the time we got through the crisis, literally nobody would care.
So, Whoever in the administration decided that this was the week to basically tell the world we're going to kill the leader of another country because that's what we did, it's really good timing.
It's like it approaches genius-level strategy timing.
I mean, it couldn't be better than this if that's the outcome we wanted.
My God, it's just breathtakingly perfect.
That doesn't mean it'll happen, it doesn't mean it'll happen soon, etc., but good strategy.
But here's the thing.
What does it mean that Venezuela is in part of the zone that might be at least part of the source that the entire world probably wants more of, this tree bark?
And I need a fact check on that, because I'm definitely into speculative territory here, so don't take anything I'm taking too seriously until you get some fact checks.
If Venezuela is also a source for this tree bark, and we know that the price of oil collapsed, which is Venezuela's lifeblood, what would the, let's say, bad actor head of Venezuela do if suddenly, by this accident of the crisis, They happen to be sitting on a whole bunch of this tree bark that everyone in the world would pay any amount of money to get.
Now, I don't know if that's true.
Again, depends if there are other ways to make it, which I'll talk about in a minute.
Depends if there's really a shortage.
I don't know if there is. Maybe it's not a raw material shortage.
But if Madura is even accused of hoarding that tree bark...
Or, you know, jacking up the price, or selling it to people we don't like, you know, whatever.
If he's even slightly implicated, and of course he has been implicated in drug dealing, but we don't know what the drug is, it's just a free punch.
I'm sorry. If you hear that Madura was doing something that might make the crisis worse, it's just a free punch.
You know, he could go this week and you wouldn't care about Alright, I'm not recommending it.
I'm just saying the timing is perfect.
Smarter people have to decide what's right.
Here's the other way that you can apparently synthesize this hydroxychloroquine, the Trump pills.
Apparently coal tar, coal tar, and somebody else said carbon, you know, oil.
I don't know if that's true. But somebody said coal tar could be the base for synthesizing it.
Now, my limited understanding is that you can...
Yeah, somebody's saying synthetic.
So the other thing you can do is make it synthetically.
My understanding is that the only reason you wouldn't make it synthetically is that it's more expensive to do it that way than to just strip some bark and, you know, do it the fast way.
But at the moment, and during a crisis, of course, economics get turned upside down.
All that matters is that we get it.
It doesn't matter that it's expensive.
Because remember, it's really inexpensive.
It's like $20 for a dose.
If you tripled it, most people are still going to pay it and be happy about it.
So we can get the expensive stuff.
So what I don't have visibility on is how quickly our, whoever's making this, American companies or Coordinating with offshore companies that are working for the American companies, I don't know.
But we have complete lack of knowledge, the public does, about what that pipeline looks like.
Now just think about that.
Think about the fact that we're in a worldwide pandemic, and the news business can't tell you if one of the most promising things that we have in our arsenal, this drug, If we have enough of it, is there a risk we won't have enough of it?
How fast are they cranking up?
Is there any shortage? Do we have a raw supply problem?
Are we geared up to synthesize that much?
These are pretty basic questions.
Now we don't need to know every detail, but wouldn't you like to know, is there enough?
And the entire worldwide reporting structure, every country, every country, Every political leaning, every one of them, has given you no information.
None. No information on what could be the most important question of all this, which is, is there a med that works?
Do we have enough of it?
And if we don't, what are we doing about it?
Really? If we don't have visibility on that, or I would settle for knowing that the news organizations are trying as hard as they can to get that information, but it's hard.
If that's the case, then I'd say, all right, well, they're working on it.
It's just hard. I'll wait a little longer.
But at this point, can't you determine that there is no such thing as a news business in the sense that they'll go out and find stuff that you couldn't find out on your own?
At the moment, the news business is just pointing a camera at our politicians and listening to them mostly lie to us.
Right? Somebody said, panicking old man.
I don't know if that was about me, but I'm going to block you anyway.
Somebody says, Breitbart has it.
I'll go look for that. So Breitbart has been the, I think, shining star of the entire episode, the crisis so far.
I think they've had the best reporting.
Your mileage might differ, but I feel like Breitbart has had the best reporting so far.
Jack Dorsey, head of Twitter, tweeted at the government that maybe we should be looking at direct cash payments using the Cash App.
This is one of Jack Dorsey's products.
It's an app that lets you move cryptocurrency around.
Now, that might be a good idea.
Well, I'll go further than that.
We should definitely be looking into it.
Because there has to be some limitations to how easy it is to get checks to everybody.
And then you've got tons of people who don't have checking accounts.
What do you do with the people you send a check to and they don't have checking accounts?
Well, I guess I can take you to a bank and try to get it cashed.
Maybe that'll work. But it would certainly be cleaner and faster just to load up people's accounts.
Now, the hard part would be to know you didn't double count because you're still going to have to mail out some checks.
Did you give somebody some cash that should have been a check?
So there might be some difficulties in that, but that's solidly in the category of things that should be looked at.
I don't think our government has the capability to analyze that.
Certainly not in the context of a crisis.
So I think the government's going to act conservatively, and that's probably not going to be on their short list of things they can deal with in an emergency.
It probably takes a little more considerate thought.
But I also haven't heard Jack's explanation of it.
So if I hear more about that, I will pass it along.
I would like to, speaking on the same topic, Can you imagine being in this situation without Twitter?
I mean, think about that.
Think about how much information you got from Twitter.
Think about how many lies from the World Health Organization, from your own government, you were first notified on Twitter.
How many things were just ridiculously bad advice that you wouldn't have known it was bad advice until you saw it on Twitter?
If you ask me, having this crisis without Twitter would be a disaster.
It's already a disaster.
But it would be magnified much worse.
Twitter probably, and social media and the news business, is probably getting people pretty panicky.
And you'd have to say that's a cost that you wish you didn't have.
But I'll say it as many times as I have to say it, because everybody has a different panic level.
We're all very different about that.
What is it that makes you panic is different than what makes me panic.
You have to panic 10% of the people to near death to get the other 90% to do what they need to do to save the people who are panicked to death from actually dying.
So if anybody has a better way To get the entire country to move in a productive way than scaring the shit out of 10% of us.
I've never heard of it.
Never heard of it. So if you're complaining that social media and the news is making people panic, it's a factual statement.
They are doing exactly that.
And they're probably ahead of the problem, meaning that The problems they're talking about are future assumed problems.
They're not even talking about what's happening at the moment as much.
And when they do, it's anecdotal and it makes you think things are worse than they are.
But, you know, Twitter as a tool to protect the world against some types of risks, I think, is proven.
I think Twitter has proven itself to be Essentially, the emergency brain of the universe.
Well, maybe not the universe, but at least our galaxy.
And what I mean by that is, during good times, we separate into individual needs.
You know, I'm just fighting for what I want in my capitalist world.
You're fighting for what you want in your capitalist world.
We've got winners and losers, but overall, it works.
But in an emergency, We immediately sort of grouped together and spontaneously formed a global brain.
Now, I think that much of that will dissipate as things improve, because when things are good, you can just retreat from the global brain into your individual brain, try to maximize your life and your family, and that system works well if we're all just pursuing our individual needs during good times.
But without Twitter, we could not have formed a global brain, one that is far more powerful than all of the sum of the parts.
It's keeping us sane.
It's telling us what to think about.
It's identifying leaders.
It's showing us where resources are.
It's connecting people. If there's some kind of award for the greatest asset You know, maybe it goes to ventilators and N95 masks and doctors and stuff, but Twitter's in the top five.
The Henry Ford Health Center put out some guidelines about how to handle, if you have too many people who are in a near-death situation, how do you handle that?
Now, most of the advice was just straight up, you know, we've got to make some choices and Unfortunately, some will die.
So it's just basic triage, medical, ethical medical triage.
But then they stuck this sentence in there with all the good medical advice that was pretty standard, even though it's scary.
It says this.
Removing ventilator will not be based on race, gender, health insurance status, sexual orientation, employment, or immigration status.
Okay. Did that need to be said?
Because I hope that didn't need to be said.
Did Henry Ford Health Center imagine that they have a doctor or a nurse who would be standing in the room and say, you know, I don't think this Elbonian's worth much.
I think I'll take this off and give it to a Nigerian or a Norwegian.
Is that happening? Is somebody going to say, you know, This person on the ventilator, I've checked their citizenship and got to let you go.
Looks like you're a Mexican citizen.
Was that going to happen? Really?
Did they need to tell anybody this?
I certainly agree with it, but the most shocking thing I've seen so far is the idea that somebody thought their employees needed to be told that.
Did they? I don't know.
Next topic. We're all alarmed that 3.28 million people filed for unemployment.
Is that an alarming number?
You've been told, my God, my God, 3.28 million people filed for unemployment.
My God. Is that a lot?
Let's do some math.
Let's say each of the 3.28 million people who filed for unemployment, now this is on top of regular unemployment, Let's say you gave them all $2,000 per week, tax-free, they don't have to pay any taxes on just $2,000 a week.
That's $8,000 a month, which would be way above the average income, especially tax-free, way above the average income in this country.
So this is just a thought experiment, not a suggestion.
So if you gave all $3.28 million $2,000 per week, for $8,000 a month, what would it cost?
Well, it would cost about, I'm going to round, grossly round these numbers, but about $7 billion per week.
Or $28 billion per month.
And let's say we ran this for three months.
$84 billion.
So for $84 billion out of a $2 trillion package, just $84 billion, Big number, but it seems like a small number today, right?
For $84 billion, you could pay every one of those unemployed people more money than most of them have ever made in that three months.
And you wouldn't even notice it.
You know, if the only thing we had going on today was, uh-oh, we suddenly need $84 billion that we didn't know we needed, well, we wouldn't like it, but we'd barely notice it, right?
But it's more than that.
Is it even $84 billion?
So let me delve into economics territory a little bit more deeply than I feel comfortable.
So let's put this in the form of a question.
If there are any economists out there who have superior economic understanding than me, and that would be most economists probably, fact check me on this.
So here are the things I think are right about this proposed $2 trillion legislation.
I believe that they plan to pay for it by printing money as opposed to borrowing.
So that's the first fact check.
Can you make sure that that's true?
That they're not going to borrow, which would raise everybody's debt, but rather they're going to print money, which would raise inflation.
Now the way that works is, If we have the same amount of goods, you know, everybody who's selling stuff in the United States still has the same number of them, but you add a bunch of dollars into the system, then there will be more people with money compared to the same number of goods.
And that could lead to inflation because people will say, hey, you know, I'll pay more for that because there's more money and it just feels like it's free money because of inflation.
So here's my point.
Inflation is a gigantic civilization-ending problem if it gets too high.
If it's low, it's just an annoyance.
If it's zero, it's free money.
Now, I'm exaggerating for effect, but follow me on this.
If you're in a situation of a guaranteed recession, which we are for the next three months, it's guaranteed.
There's no question there's going to be a recession.
Just mathematically, it's guaranteed.
Who can raise their prices for normal goods?
I'm not talking about masks and medical equipment.
But who's going to be able to raise their price for headphones?
For the next three months.
Who is selling these little stands that you put your phone in?
Can they raise their price in the next three months?
Of course not. If anything, they're going to lower the prices to try to get rid of inventory.
So in a world which I don't think we've ever seen this before, this is just the weirdest situation, in which inflation is zero or negative, if the only problem of printing money is Is that it might hurt inflation, and inflation is zero or negative.
It's free money.
Am I wrong? And here's the part that I don't quite have the background to be able to think through it.
Maybe you have to do complicated computer models.
Maybe nobody knows. So it could be that after you pass the three months, you'll wish you hadn't done it.
Once things get back to normal, maybe there's still too much cash floating around.
Is that when it becomes a problem?
But check me on this.
Because I don't know if...
I may be talking crazy talk.
Usually I could be talking crazy talk.
But just check me on that.
That printing money during a time of really no risk of inflation shouldn't be that big of a problem, right?
Just check me on that.
All right. So I'll just put that out there.
I would like to give some credit...
To one of my disagreeing critics on Twitter.
Now, I've often said to you that, you know, this is sort of the loser-think idea here, and the idea is that if people disagree with me, usually it's because there's some identifiable piece of loser-think involved, that there's just some gap in their understanding of the universe, and I can identify, it's like, oh, The reason you're saying that is because you don't have a background in economics.
Or, oh, okay, I get where you're coming from.
The reason you think that is because you don't have a background in psychology or how the human mind works, that sort of thing.
But when I see somebody who does actually understand how things work and does not engage in loser think, and they disagree with me, I stop and say, okay, what am I doing wrong this time?
So there's one of these situations, and I'm just going to put it out there, not as a right or wrong, but just note it, because it disagrees with me, but it's rational.
This is the part that's bugging me, right?
It goes like this, and I don't know if you're watching, but this is Robert Barnes, attorney, and I would say I know him, but from Twitter.
You know, there are people that you interact with so much on Twitter, and That you feel like you know them personally and you forget you haven't been in the same room.
But Robert Barnes, I know to be, have watched him for years talking about Trump-related stuff, and he's almost always ahead of the curve.
He's on the right side of stuff.
He's rational. He knows how to pull an argument apart.
When he disagrees with me, I usually stop and say, uh-oh, what did I do this time?
So here's the disagreement.
I'm on the side that says...
That if we did nothing to aggressively address the pandemic, that the death rate would be way higher than normal flu and crippling.
That if you sort of didn't treat it seriously, it wouldn't be like a seasonal flu.
It would be like a really big problem.
But I also think that we're doing a heroic job in the United States, especially a heroic job of Of assembling our human ingenuity and resources and changing everything from the way we think to the way we act and doing it fairly quickly.
So my prediction is that we will also have a low death rate.
And I'm going to go uber-optimist.
So I haven't seen other people's predictions, but I'm going to make a prediction that the total U.S. death count will stay under 5,000.
Which would be less than the common flu, but only because we're working on this one so hard.
So I'm optimistic that the death rate, even though the infection rate and the sickness rate will zoom, that we'll find a way to keep the death rate from climbing.
So that's where I'm at.
Could be right, could be wrong, because it's a prediction, right?
We don't know if I'm right.
We don't know if I'm wrong.
We just know it's a prediction.
And we know that I've agreed with the worst-case doom predictors under the assumption that you don't do anything about it.
So I've agreed with the doom people if you don't do anything.
Robert Barnes, and I hope I can characterize his argument accurately, because the parts that I understand, I think I understand it, are logical.
And it goes like this.
Where are the hospitals that are over capacity?
Because we should be seeing it already.
And I thought, and I responded to him, my God, are you watching a different news than I am?
How could you not see just multiple reports of hospitals that are being slammed and bodies are being put in refrigerated trucks and nurses are panicked and out of supplies and they're piling people in hallways and stuff.
So I'm hearing all these things.
And then Dan Robert Barnes, sort of, I forget the exact exchange, but he kind of challenged me to show my sources.
And at first I was just mad.
I was just mad.
Because I thought to myself, my God, am I your Google?
You can't see sources everywhere?
So I asked people, you know, I tweeted.
I said, well, I'll just settle this.
I'll just tweet it. Put your...
You know, reports in the comments of all the places that are already, just already becoming, you know, like morgues and, you know, deathly hellscapes.
And I thought, well, Robert Barnes is going to see all of these comments, all the reports and the stories, tweeted at him showing that there are hospitals that are just being absolutely devastated.
Except that didn't happen.
What I thought would happen is all of these rock-solid reports of credible things that are bad.
Instead, there were a lot of reports that all had the same quality.
They're not even slightly credible.
Or, there's a special case, or you can explain it by coincidence.
So, for example, what does it mean that 13 people died in one day in a major hospital in New York City?
Well, if it's part of a tapestry of other bad things and they're all confirmed, then you say, well, it's meaningful.
It's part of the tapestry of all the other things that are similar in other hospitals, and, yeah, clearly this is part of the picture.
But you've got to ask yourself, have 13 elderly people ever died in a major hospital on one day before?
Maybe. Have you ever had 13 deaths?
Or, and let me ask it another way, do we know that this hospital was not a magnet hospital?
In other words, and this is just speculating, I'm just saying all the things we don't know.
I'm not saying what happened because I don't know.
I'm just saying all the things we don't know are a lot.
For example, if you were in New York City and somebody was suspected of having this flu, the COVID, Would they go to whatever is the nearest hospital, or would they quite rationally say, let's take them to the best hospital that still has capacity, because they're the best ones for dealing with a specific problem?
Could you imagine, and this is a question, not a statement, could you imagine that the reason 13 people died in the same hospital on the same day Is that the bad cases were specifically taken to the same place?
Could you imagine that if this were seasonal flu, everybody would just go to the closest hospital?
Thirteen of them might have died anyway, but you wouldn't notice because they were distributed.
Now, I don't know if anything like that happened.
I'm just saying that if I'm going to take...
Here I'm being devil's advocate to my own argument.
I'm going to take Robert Barham's point of view and say, does it hold up?
Did it hold up against that piece of evidence?
And the answer is yes. It held up not in the sense that I know what's going on there.
It held up in the sense that I don't know what's going on there.
So that's not confirmed to be evidence of anything.
It's just a thing that's not explained.
So point for Robert Barnes.
Let's go on. I also said we've never seen hospitals being pushed as hard as they are.
That we're already, I said, we're already over capacity at hospitals.
So the debate is over, right?
You don't have to wonder.
Just look.
To which Robert Barnes responds with an article, with Source, showing that in 2018, hospitals were building tents and emergency expanding just for the regular flu.
Did you know that? And now I say to myself, okay, so that does look a lot like this.
Doesn't mean Robert Barnes is right.
Doesn't mean my view of the world is wrong.
But it's a good point, right?
If I'm going to be honest, that's a fair point.
So we can't tell by looking at it today because there are a little bit too much of the special cases going on.
And we also know that 99% of hospitals, based on lots of anecdotal reports I got yesterday, most hospitals don't yet have a crisis, and they've cleared their schedules and got rid of the unnecessary or the elective surgeries.
So most hospitals are just twiddling their thumbs and trying to make sure that they're ready in case something happens.
But it's early, right?
And then...
Also pointed out that China, South Korea, and Japan seem to have bent their curves, meaning that the curve is bendable.
So we know that.
We can bend the curve. I don't know if we have good enough visibility about why.
Some people say it's face masks.
I think that's a good hypothesis.
Might be the culture.
Maybe there's not as much kissing on the cheek in Japan, because there isn't.
It could be that there's simply more compliance.
It could be that Americans are just going to say, screw the government, I'm going outside anyway.
I'm going to go to the concert anyway.
That would be a very American thing to do and not in a good way.
Whereas in Japan, if we learn anything from the end of World War II, it looks like the population in Japan is very You know, leader-friendly.
Meaning when the leader tells them to do anything, they seem to comply.
How much difference does that make?
In South Korea, China, maybe the same thing.
And in China, maybe we have questions about the actual data.
All right, so here's the bottom line.
Robert Barnes, your movie exists intact.
Meaning that your view of the world, your filter on the world, cannot, at this point, you know, today with what we know...
That movie is still fine.
There's no debunking data, and let me just say as clearly as possible, I agree with you that your hypothesis that this is all overblown and wouldn't have been much more than the regular flu is still alive.
I still disagree with it completely.
And the reason I disagree with it completely is that the people who have been most right still say, okay, if we didn't do a lot to stop this, we're still going to be in trouble.
So I'm still biased toward the experts and biased toward the people who have predicted right so far.
But that doesn't mean Robert Barnes is wrong.
I think we should act as though he's wrong to get a better result.
He would disagree with that, I think.
So at the moment, two movies still alive.
I think mine will be the winner.
But here's the fun part.
When it's all over, if what happens in the end is not many people died, we will argue forever if it was because we did such a good job or it was because it was a mass hysteria and it was never that big a problem in the first place.
We will never know.
And that's where we're heading for.
Alright, there's big news about Representative Thomas Massey, Kentucky.
Apparently he is the one holdout against a voice vote.
Now I don't know too much about the rules of the House, but this is what I think is right.
That the House can call for a unanimous consent, meaning to get to yes without an actual vote where you count everybody's vote.
Now you would do that in a situation where You don't expect disagreement, and you don't need to take the time to do the vote, and you don't need to get on record about who is for it and against it.
So even the people who would want to vote against something, if they know they're going to lose, sometimes for unity and also to hide their vote, they might say, well, let's just agree it's unanimous.
It looks like it only takes one person to ruin that plan, and that one person has emerged.
So Representative Massey from Kentucky is concerned about the legislation having pork and unnecessary things and also calculated on Twitter that it would cost $17,000 per person in debt.
Now, here's one of those small world stories.
I keep telling you that my experience is just absolutely bizarre.
Because the entire size of the planet, for just my personal experience, has just shrunk.
And it feels like if somebody's in the news, I can just talk to them.
You know, somebody will be headline news today, and I'll just say, huh, I think I'll send them a message.
And then I'll get a message back from the person who's the most important person in the world.
And I think, did that just happen?
Did I just send a message to the most important person in the world, and I got a reply in 39 minutes?
That's happening massively all over the place.
It's not just me. Your ability to connect to your government representatives is amazing right now.
I mean, we'll never be able to completely know what difference that made and how it helps, and maybe it won't last.
But at the moment, you can really get a hold of people in a crazy way.
So, to round out my story, Twitter suggests people to follow.
And I happened to notice that Representative Massey was suggested as somebody to follow, probably because I was reading the hashtags about him.
And I looked over and I noticed that he follows me on Twitter.
So I thought, well, what happens if I follow him back?
I'll just send him a DM, give him my opinion, see what happens.
So this morning I followed him on Twitter.
While I'm reading the headlines about him, I send him a message.
He got back to me in, I don't know, 15 minutes.
In 15 minutes, the most important person for this story in the country right now, for the biggest factor in the world right now is this bill.
The person who's the most important person on it got back to me on Twitter in 20 minutes.
Now, you should be happy about that, right?
That doesn't mean you agree with them, disagree with them, doesn't mean the government does everything right.
But man, when your citizens can get to somebody in 20 minutes in the middle of a crisis and get a legitimate personal response, we're doing something very, very right.
And again, credit to Jack Dorsey and the founders of Twitter for making this even possible.
So let me just tell you what I told them.
So I sent them a DM and I said this.
I said, Representative Messy, The entire country agrees with you that the relief legislation is flawed.
I think that's fair, right?
Don't you think Republicans and Democrats all agree that this thing is flawed?
And I said, but given the psychology of the country, we need fast action on a flawed plan far more than we need a principled stand.
So I don't disagree one bit.
With his disagreements, I only weigh the priorities different, that we need fast action for the psychology of the country, as well as the pocketbook of the country, even if it's not perfect.
And then I said the following.
My limited understanding is that we're printing money for this, not borrowing.
So remember, he did the calculation of $17,000 per person we would owe.
So I said, we're printing money, not borrowing.
And when inflation is this low and the current downturn makes it impossible to raise prices on most goods, the printed money is closer to free because it won't cause inflation.
It's the only time in the world that would ever be true.
I can't think of any other time you could print that much money and still be sure it wouldn't necessarily cause inflation in the short run anyway.
And so he responded back to me, said he's been following me for a while in a And apparently he watches these periscopes.
So Representative Massey, if you are watching this, a lot of respect for you, for your opinion, and a lot of respect for you for getting back to a member of the citizens who had a genuine concern.
So thank you for that.
And he got back to me and he said he appreciated my perspective and thanked me for reaching out.
And that's all I would ask.
Nobody's asking their government officials to change their mind on the spot, make a new decision.
Nobody's going to ask him to change his mind just because he got a DM. But I know he heard me.
I know he heard me.
And his response acknowledges that.
And I can't say enough about how encouraging this is about human beings.
In who we are and how we're going to act in a crisis, right?
So we've got lots of bad examples, but every once in a while you get a good example.
So credit to Representative Massey.
I would like to see you get past this in whatever way maintains your principles.
All right. Let's see.
So it looks like the government is preparing some kind of a geographic-based plan for taking people back to work.
I've got a big question about this.
And I'll say this is short of an opinion, because I still have a little gap in my thinking.
Maybe you can fill it in. It goes like this.
Compare these two plans.
One plan is to say, okay, this county hasn't had much problems.
And yeah, I know that people can drive in and out of the county, so they might have some problems if they open up.
But we're going to open it by geography and then play it by ear.
I suppose you could close them back up if you've got a problem.
So that's the plan.
And it has the advantage of simplicity.
So it's got that.
But let's compare it to An alternative plan that I'm going to describe right now.
Instead of making a geographic decision, could you not make it individual?
And could you not make a simple checklist, which you ask people to adhere to, knowing that not everybody will?
You know, that's the nature of people.
Not everybody is going to adhere to even a law, much less a guideline.
But suppose the government said this.
We're going to test you for genetic risk.
We can do it fairly quickly.
And if we find that you are at low genetic risk, and I think we can determine that, that's an unknown, but highly, highly likely that we could start testing people who had a bad outcome, test people who had a good outcome, and I think we'd find a reason in their genes.
We could do that fairly quickly.
We've got lots of resources to do that.
Let's say that We find out what the correlation is, but you've also...
Let's say you've got a 23andMe, and you can just download your data, bounce it against it, and find out what your risk is.
I don't know if that'll work, but there's a good indication it might.
So that's just one idea.
So suppose you could say, all right, all right, no matter what geography you're in, if you've gone through this process...
I'm actually testing your DNA against, you know, the known risky DNA, and you look low risk, maybe you could go back to work even if you're in New York City.
Now again, I'm speaking hypothetically, somebody who knows these risks better would have to talk to it, but I'm giving you a framework for decision.
Based on individuals.
The other thing is you could just say, you know, the moment you have enough of this hydroxychloroquine so that the doctor can hand them out like M&Ms to anybody who has a sniffle, could we not say then, if you're in a place that has good supply, so let's say we know New York City has a good supply of this drug.
I don't, but let's say we did know that.
We probably can know that.
You can say, well, if you're young and you have access to it, you're in a place that isn't in shortage, you can go back to work.
Because the worst case is you get it, you've got to keep yourself away from other people for a while.
Suppose we say it also depends on your job.
There are some jobs that are physical separation all over the place by their nature.
If you're a truck driver, And the only contact you have is on both ends of the pick-up and the drop-off.
How hard would it be to modify the pick-off and drop-off so that it's not a risk?
You know, just people stay away, or it's just one guy on a truck lift, and when he's doing his work, you back off and stay away.
Wouldn't there be lots of jobs where you would be willing to certify that you're not going to be within six feet of anybody?
No way. You'll just make sure you do it.
Could that not be, at least on a voluntary basis, a criteria?
So here's the thing. Maybe it could also be based on availability of gloves and masks.
Suppose you say, I'm 25 years old.
I have an N95 mask.
It's two weeks from now. We don't have enough of them now, but let's say it's two weeks from now.
I've got a mask.
I'm a certain age, I'm healthy, no underlying conditions that I know of, and I've got a job where I'm not going to be within six feet of people.
Can't I go back to work?
Can't I? So, somebody's asking me to block them.
Can do. I don't know why, but I'm sure you had a reason.
So, these are just a sample of ways that we could decide if an individual is.
Now, would people who do not meet these criteria say, well, I need a paycheck, so even though I don't quite meet these criteria, I'm going to go out there because lots of people are going to work and maybe nobody will notice.
Would that happen? Yeah, that would happen.
But remember, you're not trying to get the infection down to zero.
That's not the goal. I mean, we'd love that.
But the immediate goal is to get the infection rate of spread below one.
One person gives it to fewer than one people.
Fewer than one people?
Is that even a sentence?
Fewer than one person.
I think that some amount of social pressure, whistleblowing, and maybe the police tapping you on the shoulder, if it's obvious you're congregating and violating, there may be enough social pressure and, you know, government tapping you on the back that could reduce the number of people who are just being stupid and violating the guidelines, probably to a lower number.
I mean, look at what happened when they said close everything.
When the government said, just close everything that's not essential, it worked, right?
It didn't happen on day one, but didn't it work?
I don't think there's a restaurant that's open in an area where they're supposed to not be open.
So you can get compliance.
So I think that's a mistake if the only thing they do is by geography.
It should be geography, but also individual risk.
I don't know that we have enough masks, genetic tests, You know, home tests for easy tests.
So I don't know enough hydrochloroquine.
So we may not have enough assets to judge on an individual basis yet.
So that might be phase two.
But wouldn't you like to hear that a phase two is coming?
Like, I'd like to hear Dr.
Burke say, the best we can do in our current situation is there's some counties that can open.
Your state will decide.
That would be cool for the first thing they tell us.
But I'd like to hear very, very soon after that, we don't know yet, but what we're working on is some kind of a deal where if you meet this checklist, you too individually can go to work in some cases, no matter where you are.
Because New York City has to run also, right?
So that's what I want to see for my government.
Let's see if it happens.
Oh, that's about as much as I want to do now, and I will.
Let's see. Just make sure I talked about everything I want to do.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Yeah, I think I did. That's it for now.
I'll try to come back at the same time in the p.m.
for a simultaneous swaddle in a nice warm blanket.
Everything's going in the right direction, even if it doesn't look like it.
Americans are winning.
Humans are winning.
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