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March 28, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:09:06
Episode 877 Scott Adams: Simultaneously Sip the Crisis Away With Calming Words From Your Favorite Cartoonist

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Connecting suppliers with need: http://ProjectN95.com NYT article on Russian and Chinese malign actors Did POLITICO report Chinese propaganda as fact? CNN fact-checking TRICK VP Pence hospital supplies analysis Economists versus Doctors Suggestion: Nobody pays rent or mortgage for 3 months Raman Spectrometer modified to ID COVID-19 by saliva Potential of the #TrumpPills --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Hey everybody, come on in.
This is your source for the least gloomy opinions on the coronavirus that you will ever see.
Oh, it's bad.
It's plenty bad, and it's going to be bad for a little while.
But there is also reason for optimism and hope.
And we can find a little way to feel good no matter what's happening.
Because that's who we are.
That's how we roll.
There may be bad things in the world, but that doesn't mean you have to feel bad.
Not all the time. Not until you absolutely have to.
And for most of us, we don't absolutely have to yet.
And one of the ways to make things better is with a simultaneous sip, but it doesn't take much.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a 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 a pandemic, better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
And it's happening right now.
Go. Yeah, you know, everything's better.
It's weird. You know, you think it's not going to work, then you take the sip, and everything's a little bit better.
I mean, not 80% better, but, you know, you can feel it.
One, two percent, I think you can feel it.
Let's talk about all the things.
There are many things, and we will talk about them.
Number one, I continue to get messages from people in all manner of ways asking how to connect with potential buyers.
In some cases they have sources of masks and other protective equipment.
So I'll tell you at the top of this, the website to go to is ProjectN95.com.
Now that's N95 as in the masks that are N95 types, but it's not just masks.
So it's other protective stuff is in there.
And they are... Collecting people who have stuff to offer to sell and sources with buyers.
I don't have any opinion of how well it works or anything like that.
I haven't used it, but that's the government's preferred website for that stuff.
Hilariously, people sent me two articles today.
One was an article from the New York Times talking about all the Chinese and Russian disinformations.
So apparently the Russians and the Chinese have decided that in the middle of a pandemic, this would be the good time to start damaging rumors for the United States.
Decouple. It's time to decouple.
And Russia, if we can decouple from your asses, let's do that too, because it seems that you are a malign actor.
I like using that word. When you hear people on TV say, I think they're a malign actor.
And every time I hear that, I say, is that even the right word?
Are they maligning?
Are they malignable?
Are they someone who maligned?
Is it right to say they're malign actors?
Why does that sound wrong? That's what I say every time I hear that.
And then I said, I'm going to say that in public and see what happens.
But I digress. So I'm reading the story in the New York Times, talking about all the Chinese disinformation and Russian disinformation, and It looks like the Russians might be laying a little bit low because they don't want to start any rumors once the pandemic is worse for them.
They don't want to start any rumors in the world that would blow back on them and then their own citizens would think it was true.
So they're being a little careful.
Now, who knows? If you read the New York Times article about what Russian spies are thinking, can you really believe that?
Yes, the New York Times is accurately reporting the internal thoughts of spies, Russian spies, who are by profession liars.
By profession. And the New York Times is reporting it like, yeah, we know what they're thinking.
Yeah, the Russians decided to hold off a little bit.
What? How could you possibly know that?
You couldn't possibly know that.
That is the fakest of ridiculous fake news I've ever read.
Oh, no, it's not.
There's more. So, the Chinese disinformation seems well established because the actual diplomats were doing it.
And they were doing it in public.
You know, the diplomats were saying, well, I think it's some American service person who brought us that virus.
It wasn't.
So, while I'm reading the New York Times report about all this Chinese and other disinformation, then somebody else sent me a Politico report saying that...
The so-called Trump pills, the hydroxychloroquine, probably doesn't work.
So Politico is reporting it probably doesn't work.
And one of the main pieces of information in it was from a Chinese university who said in their small test it looked like it didn't work.
But you know it does work. It's a weird coincidence.
But the Chinese university, what are the odds of this really?
But quite a coincidence that the stuff that's widely available and practically free because it's so inexpensive, that that stuff doesn't work.
But the things that are expensive and only made in China, a couple other drugs, show a lot of promise, according to the Chinese study.
Now, in my opinion, that just looks like Chinese disinformation.
But Politico reports that Like it's a fact without questioning it in the context of, but of course everything China tells us is false, but we're not going to mention that in the context of this one very important piece of information.
Which could be transformative in terms of how we treat the virus.
Transformative either way.
Transformative that these pills don't work at all, or transformative that they do.
I mean, it's one of the biggest questions in the world, and they report it out of a Chinese source, which obviously is government-controlled.
It's a university in China.
Without the context that we're receiving a blizzard of disinformation, and we know it.
We're not guessing.
And we see it's in public.
Their diplomats are actually saying it right in public.
So Politico, what's going on here?
What's going on?
Is the Politico article actually foreign disinformation?
Now, I'm not going to make an accusation that the publication or that the writer of it Was knowingly accepting money from a Chinese source?
Nothing like that. I'm not making that kind of observation.
I'm just saying that as an objective reader, it reads exactly like it was written by China.
Now, that could be a coincidence.
But we're in an environment where you really can't trust any publication in the press.
You can't trust any of them.
You can't trust anything our government says.
And you can't trust anything any other government says.
I don't even think you can trust doctors at this point, at least completely.
I'm still going to trust doctors more than I trust anybody else, all things being equal.
But I'm going to favor local doctors, right?
Doctors in the United States, I'm going to say, well, yeah, of everybody we're talking about, let's say this.
If you were to rank the credibility...
Of all of the players on the stage right now, I would say American doctors would be top.
Every politician would be just ridiculous at this point.
It doesn't matter what country you're talking about.
And all the foreign sources, be they scientists or governments or diplomats, are completely non-credible.
Just completely. Let's talk about the hydroxychloroquine.
So the The setup that the anti-Trump press is trying to establish is that Trump is overselling this thing and he's too enthusiastic, despite the fact that every single time he mentions it, he says, we don't know if it's going to work.
I mean, every time he says that.
And how more accurate could you be?
What could be more accurate than, I have a good feeling about it, It's not scientifically demonstrated in the scientific ways.
It might work, it might not, but I feel good about it.
I don't feel that's inaccurate, but you can always question whether the optimism is getting ahead of the reality, but his job, unlike maybe your job, the President's job is also managing our psychology.
So if the president gave us some false hope, let's just say hypothetically.
Hypothetically, if the president gave us a little bit of false hope on this one thing, but we still come out okay after the fact, let's say some other technologies, and I'll talk about that.
Let's say testing or blood serum or something else end up being the thing that saves us.
At the end of this, five years later, when you look back, Will you say that the president made a big mistake by suggesting that the hydroxychloroquine he was enthusiastic about while also saying it might or might not work and we don't have definitive tests?
Would that be wrong?
I actually don't know the answer to that question.
Because if it made us feel better, even if it were inaccurate, but we also got to a good result, Isn't the best world that you feel confident and you get a good result?
Because then you're feeling better and then you're also getting a good outcome.
Now suppose that you gave us false hope and then we made gigantic decisions based on it.
I don't think that's going to happen because I think the whole point of waiting a few weeks is that we're pretty sure we'll have better visibility on this drug and other options.
So I don't think there's an option of getting it wrong.
In other words, making a big go-back-to-work decision before Dr.
Fauci says, yeah, I think that's a good idea.
I don't see that happening.
If it did, I'd have some big questions.
But I think we'll know in a few weeks if this is a good bet or not, and we'll go with it.
So don't believe anybody. And I'll tell you, my head was just shaking when I was reading Politico because it did read like, I'm not accusing him, I'm just saying that it read to my eyes and my mind like the Chinese government wrote it.
I swear to God, it just read like that.
But I'm not saying they did.
All right. Here are things to not believe.
So in this blizzard of disinformation, the following things you should not believe...
Number one, anonymous reports from hospitals or hospital staff.
I would believe, you know, I would still put it in context, but if it's a person who names himself and names the place and then tells you something about it, that might be pretty reasonable.
But even online, you can see, I see exchanges of people chatting on Twitter where somebody will say, my brother's cousin is Reports that this hospital is in deep trouble.
And then somebody else will say, I got a friend there, he says just the opposite.
You know, they're impacted, but they're fine.
So all the anecdotal reports are completely non-credible.
And I suspect some number of these are actually foreign disinformation.
You know, you have to assume, let me put it this way.
If you were China...
Or Russia, and you wanted the United States to have all the wrong information so we'd get a bad result.
Wouldn't you promote anecdotal stories of one unsourced person who said, my hospital is crashing?
You would, right?
So I feel like that would be the most obvious thing a foreign entity would do, is to send an anecdote that doesn't have good sourcing around and try to promote it.
So I wouldn't believe any of the anecdotes.
And the other story that I think you should have great skepticism about, but could be true.
So remember, when I tell you to doubt a story, that doesn't mean it's not true.
That just means you can't believe it's true.
It doesn't have the requisite credibility about it, which you should have just accepted as an uncritical fact.
It doesn't have that. So the other category is the younger persons who die from the coronavirus.
Which is not to say that young people are not dying.
I would assume that it's happening.
I assume young people are also dying somewhere in the world at some rate.
But any individual story you see about that, I wouldn't trust it at all.
For the obvious reason that it's anecdotal.
It's not any kind of a scientific study.
But more to the point, it's too easy to fake, and it's exactly what somebody would fake.
So, and it's also too easy to be wrong.
Because if somebody has an unexpected, you know, death, and also has a coronavirus, you know, how is that going to be reported?
Well, unexpected death, of course I didn't do an autopsy, nobody's doing autopsies, so I don't really know it was a coronavirus versus, I don't know, underlying heart condition.
But I'm going to report it as a coronavirus.
Because this guy's 45, got the coronavirus, suffered greatly from the symptoms, died.
What's the cause of death?
Well, might be underlying conditions, but nobody's going to do an autopsy, especially on young people.
So don't believe any anecdotes about it.
They're scary and they might be true, but don't believe them.
And again, here's some more stuff that you shouldn't totally believe, but it looks promising.
Rishi Wadera reports very preliminary studies of five critically ill patients who tried the blood serum approach, the convalescent plasma approach, which is you take the antibodies from recovered people and stick them into sick people.
And of the five critically ill who are on ventilators, now remember, you've seen other reporting that I also don't believe.
That once you get on the ventilator, you're basically dead.
It'll keep you alive for a little while, but basically there's no coming back.
Haven't you all seen those stories?
Stories to suggest it wouldn't matter how many ventilators you had, because once you're on there, it's basically just a fast path to dying anyway.
I don't believe it.
I just don't believe those stories, and I've seen them a lot.
But here's some counter evidence, which is also not credible, as everything we're hearing is not credible.
But it says that four out of five people who are on ventilators basically stabilized and went home.
And it says all five stabilized, but three are at home and need an RCT. I don't know, is that a respirator of some sort?
So at least in the very small anecdotal sense, we're seeing this convalescent plasma having an effect, not scientifically demonstrated.
But because we have past experience with this technique, and it's being used in a way that's sufficiently similar to ways it's been used successfully in the past, you would expect that it would have great potential.
Now, here's the thing. How much of this blood can you get?
How many people have recovered, and do you have access to them?
Well, that's what Ian was helping us with, with the visualization I've talked about before.
But I saw this little piece in an article about it that said this, that made me feel very happy if it's true.
Again, again, if it's true.
Literally everything I say today, you should just Append in your mind if it's true.
Big if true. And it says that antibodies can be replicated in large quantities.
Whoa! Here's one sentence that might be the most important sentence you've ever heard in your life.
Might be. Probably not, right?
Because everything's in a probably not world right now.
You're all guessing how the world is going to come out.
But listen to this sentence. Given that we know there's high medical confidence that we'll get at least some good outcome from the convalescent plasma, But the limitation, of course, is finding enough people who have recovered, who are willing to give their blood, and how long does that take, and how do you get it to the right places, right?
Those are the questions you ask.
And then there's this one sentence.
Antibodies can be replicated in large quantities.
Which means you only need it from one person.
All you need is one person who's got some good antibodies.
And if I'm reading this correctly, I don't know enough of the science to know if this is just a Straight fact or optimism.
But some science-y person said antibodies can be replicated in large quantities.
Can we just whip up barrels of this stuff by replicating it from one original source?
Somebody says that seems wrong.
I'm seeing a yes.
I'm seeing definition of recovered.
I'm just looking at your So, let me say big if true.
You know, the old joke is big if it's true.
If that's true, that looks really promising, doesn't it?
Really promising. There's some other promising things coming too.
Let's see. I'll rag on...
Let me rag on CNN a little bit more.
So this is how CNN is fact-checking the president.
And they have a trick that they're using over and over again.
And once you start seeing it, you'll just see it everywhere.
And the trick goes like this.
The president will say, the sky is blue.
Whatever. Just whatever fact.
And CNN will report that the president said the sky is red, and here's why that's wrong.
And you'll say to yourself, oh, wait a minute.
That doesn't even have anything to do with what the president said.
I just saw the President's statement that you're fact-checking, and then I read your fact-check, but they're not even the same topic.
What's going on here?
And the reason it works is because you read it quickly.
And if you read it quickly, it looks like they fact-checked them, but they're not even on the same point.
Now, I know that sounds like an exaggeration, right?
Doesn't it sound like an exaggeration?
Like, how could they do something so blatantly, say, the President says the sky is blue, and then quote him, Quote him saying, the sky is blue.
And then the next sentence say, the president says the sky is red and it's not true.
Now you don't think that's real, right?
You think I'm exaggerating?
Well, let me read you the exact quote from the fact check on CNN. And you tell me if my example was out of line, okay?
So here's what the president said, and then I'll tell you what the fact checkers at CNN said.
So they said of the President, first of all, multiple times throughout Friday's press briefing, the President claimed the current situation was unprecedented and unforeseen.
Is that true?
Is this situation unprecedented?
Well, yeah, right?
We have literally never been in this situation.
So they're saying he claims it was unprecedented, but is that...
Is that even slightly untrue?
That where we are is unprecedented?
Are you really fact-checking that?
Then the next word was unforeseen.
So now we're into a stronger point.
Was it unforeseen?
Because that's something you can really fact-check, right?
But keep in mind that unprecedented and unforeseen are CNN's own words.
If you're going to fact-check, you have to fact-check the president's words.
So don't be fooled by CNN putting their own interpretation on his words and then fact-checking their interpretation because that's their normal trick.
So then they go on.
They say, according to Trump, and here's the actual quote, nobody was prepared for this.
Is that the end of the sentence?
All right. Now, is it true that, quote, nobody was prepared for this?
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
There's no country that was prepared for this.
That's just a fact, isn't it?
We were not prepared.
China was not prepared. At least not prepared enough.
So that's just true.
Nobody was prepared for this.
Not even past presidents.
He added, here's the quote, In all fairness to all former presidents, none of them ever thought a thing like this could happen.
All right. So the claim is that he understands the inner thoughts of former presidents.
Now, you know that I always say nobody can read anybody's minds, so you're always just inferring and imagining what other people are thinking.
But would it be fair to say, of all the former presidents, that none of them, not one of them, ever thought a thing like this could happen?
Well, we don't know what they thought, but we do know what they did.
Did any of the former presidents act in a way that would suggest they thought a thing like this could happen?
I don't think so.
Because if Obama had acted in a way that he thought a thing like this could happen, wouldn't we be ready?
What would it mean if Obama did think a thing like this could happen and then he didn't do anything about it?
So I've made this point before.
That, you know, if you say you believe that a truck is coming down the road, if you're willing to walk in front of it anyway, did you really believe it?
Do you believe a truck is coming at you if you walk right in front of it?
That's the opposite of believing a truck is coming at you, assuming you want to live.
If you believe a truck is coming at you, you get out of the road.
Did we see Obama get out of the road?
When he saw the truck coming at him, the truck in this case being a pandemic that he certainly could have seen a thing in, well, apparently he wasn't prepared.
It's not like the president dismantled Obama's preparation, or, let's be nonpolitical, it's not like Obama dismantled Bush's preparation, because there wasn't any.
Or Clinton's, or the other Bush.
Nobody was prepared.
Of presidents. Here's the key thing.
So the president, President Trump, makes a statement about former presidents and what they believed based on what they did, which is nothing.
He could be right, he could be wrong, but it's sort of in the fair point category.
That if they didn't act on it, it's hard to conclude that they believed it.
That's a fair point, even though you don't know their internal thoughts.
Okay, so Trump's entire quote, the CNN is fact-checking, is statements about what past presidents knew.
That's the topic.
What did past presidents know and believe?
Here's the fact-check.
This is false, says CNN. And then it says, here's why.
The U.S. intelligence community...
What?
What? That's a different topic.
And public health experts had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic.
Experts had also warned that we could face shortages and critical medical shortages, etc.
Now, is that fact check even related to the president's statement?
Because the president said that the former presidents didn't think it could happen.
And that's based on an observable objective fact that they did not prepare for it.
Now, we don't know what they thought, but we do know they didn't prepare.
So that's what Trump was talking about.
And then the fact-checkers talk about the U.S. intelligence community and the public health experts.
Well, their fact is true, but it's not even the same topic.
It looks like the same intelligence community and public experts have been warning president after president after president, and nobody acted on it.
Not Trump. Not Obama, not Bush, not Clinton.
Nobody acted on it.
So what the president said is none of these presidents acted on it, which you infer, therefore, they didn't think it was really a risk they needed to deal with.
But at the same time, it could be perfectly true that members of, maybe not every one of them, but members of the intelligence community and health community had been saying it's a big problem.
They can both be true.
This fact check is so frickin' false, it's offensive.
All right. Let's evaluate the President's performance lately in his press conferences about the coronavirus.
I'm not happy with it, being honest.
You know, the President goes out there and There's a lot to like about it.
I like the fact that he does it.
I like the fact that he looks very leaderly, and I think he's doing the presidential thing well in general.
I think the public needs to hear from him.
I like the fact that he chews up lots of time there, because the more you see your leader talking about it, it just makes you feel a little more confident the more they communicate with you.
So there's a whole bunch I like about it.
But I think the president, He just has this impulse.
I don't know what his inner thoughts are, but he seems to be drawn toward spending a little bit too much time freelancing on the facts, if I can say that.
He's Which makes it too easy for the anti-Trump staff to do these sometimes real, and as in this obvious example, completely fake fact-checking.
And I think it just erodes people's confidence in their leader in a way that isn't necessary.
So I think I'd like to see as much or more of Trump being a leader and talking about things, but man, I He just needs a little bit more control on making factual statements about anything medical.
On one hand, I like to hear him wrestling with the medical stuff, because in so doing, He informs us that he's heard all the arguments and he's getting a view of the full field.
So that's good. So I like knowing he can speak to the facts in a lot of different ways and it's clear that he's well informed.
But his propensity to just put his own little optimistic spin on things just doesn't work in this context.
And we can't pretend it does.
I can't say it bothers me.
But if it's bothering other people, maybe we can tighten that up a little bit.
Let's see. I had a question about Mike Pence.
This is more of a question because it looks like there's a problem here.
But I don't have all the facts.
It's real easy to be, you know, sitting on the sidelines and judging the players, but the players have more information than you do, so sometimes that's hard.
And this is one of those cases. So I'm going to unconfidently criticize Pence because I don't have enough information to know I'm right about this, but enough to be alarmed.
And it's this. I think yesterday he said that they were going to work hard to contact the hospital's And collect more detailed information about what supplies they have, what they're short of, and what's in the pipeline, basically. All the things I've been asking for.
And all of us have been asking for it because it's such a big question.
And he said that they had begun a fairly big project to contact all the hospitals.
And I thought to myself, I've got two problems with that.
Number one, it sounds like it just started.
Which feels like something that should have been a week ago.
Now, I'm going to die on the following hill.
If we're criticizing people in a big old fog of war emergency for not doing the right things soon enough, it's just the weakest, most useless criticism.
Because everything should have been done sooner all the time.
All the good stuff.
So, it's just great hindsight to say you should have done this earlier.
So, it could be true that it should have been done earlier, but...
I just don't feel that these should be criticisms that were really laying on people because people are doing the best they can and it's just a tough situation and people are going to be late on some stuff and making bad guesses.
I think we just have to forgive that.
If they're well-intentioned, they're qualified, they're trying, they're putting energy into it, they're adjusting, that's all I ask for.
Anyway, so with all that context, which was too much, Here's what it feels like Pence should have done, which is there should already be a website where all the hospitals can self-report.
And Pence could have said, here's the name of the website, and all you hospitals, because every single hospital is watching the press conference, right?
There's no such thing as a hospital where the administration is not paying attention to what Pence is doing.
So Pence could just say, here's our website, We're not going to go ask you what you got.
Just go to this website and fill in what you got, what you need.
Wouldn't that be faster?
Because the first thing that would happen is that the hospitals who maybe were not in dire need maybe wouldn't go to the website.
And they also wouldn't matter.
So they would just be out of the process.
But the people who did have a dire need are far more likely to say, oh, we're in dire need.
We'll do everything. We'll take all phone calls.
We'll check everything. We'll go to that website.
And then all the people or suppliers would be able to find them.
And then also the public would have some reporting so we'd know which areas need stuff and the government could move things around for them, stock wells, etc.
So I guess the question is, why are we starting now to collect the most valuable information we could ever have except for who's infected, I guess?
And why do we do it this way?
It feels like the hard way.
Now, it could be that there are only, since I don't know much about this, so I'm not going to say this is a criticism, it's more of a question.
It could be that there are only, I don't know, 25 hospitals that are the ones that really make a difference.
So maybe you just call 25 hospitals and it's half a day, and you're really getting direct good information from somebody who tries to lie to you, but you nail them down.
So it's entirely possible that Pence's process is exactly what they should do, if it's a small number of hospitals.
So just a question.
Let's see. I put this thought...
Experiment on Twitter to see what people would say.
And it goes like this, so I'll give it to you.
Let's say you've got world-class doctors and you've got world-class economists, and they're working together as a team to decide when to open the economy back up and send people back to work, etc.
And how to deal with the whole pandemic, basically.
Who would you believe?
Whose advice should you take if they disagree?
Let's say the economists listen to the doctors, And then the economists say, let's go this direction, whatever that is.
We'll go this direction. And say the doctors listen to the economists, and the doctors say, we should go this direction.
Which of the two, because they have different, let's say both groups are unanimous, all the economists are on one side, all the doctors are on another, and they've looked at the same data.
They've looked at the same data.
Who do you believe? Now, I've got lots of opinions, and of course, everybody tried to cheat on the question, human nature.
So everybody tries to cheat, and they're like, well, the doctor is smarter than the economist.
No, that's not the question.
Just stick with the question.
If they're equally smart, and they both looked into it, who do you trust?
Here's my opinion. I'm not very confident in this opinion, but I'll put it out there for you to wrestle with.
I believe that it is easier for a doctor to explain everything that needs to be known to an economist than it is for an economist to explain everything that needs to be understood to a doctor.
And I would base my decision on that.
Because remember, in my thought experiment, all the economists and the doctors are well-intentioned and equally brilliant and accomplished.
So there's no difference in their quality of the human, just different domains that they've specialized in.
And I can be talked out of this opinion, but here's my feeling.
And here's another thought experiment.
If you say to a doctor, a medical professional, who has worked their entire life to keep people alive, you know, one-on-one, I mean, really personal life-and-death stuff, and that's their life, it's their commitment, it's the do-no-harm, it's the oath, and it's just baked in, and you're a doctor.
And then you have this proposition.
Here's the proposition. If you open the economy quickly, there will be a whole bunch of people dying fairly soon, and we'll have their names.
This is the important part.
The people who die from the coronavirus will know their names, will see their stories, will see their faces.
So these are the people, you know, conceptually, these people are going to die and we'll know exactly who they were, roughly.
Compare to if we, let's say we open up the economy, whatever prematurely it looks like.
It's just premature. We open up the economy, and then the economists say, I guarantee you that, you know, or let's say we keep the economy closed, and the economist says, I can't give you the names of people who will die.
But given this level of economic dislocation, this level of unemployment, I think 20,000 people will die, but we'll never know which ones they were or why, because they'll just be sort of lost in the bigger picture.
But if they die of the coronavirus, we'll know their names, their faces, we'll hear from their families.
It'll be real.
Now, you're a doctor, and you've lived your whole life doing person-to-person saving lives and helping people.
Which one are you biased toward?
Are you biased toward saving the 10,000 people who have names and faces and real stories?
Or are you biased toward, let's say, just to make it interesting, let's say the economist had a pretty good case that if you lock everything down, 20,000 people will die.
Let's say twice as many.
But you won't ever know their names.
Which way does the doctor go?
Well, If human nature is the way I imagine it to be, the doctor should be strongly biased towards saving $10,000 compared to a conceptual opinion from an economist that you don't really know if they're right or wrong, but it looks like it could be $20,000, but we'll never know their names.
Which way do you go? I think the doctor goes for the 10,000 who have names and are immediate and you can really identify them and you know that you killed them or didn't want to help them.
I think. So, here's the thing.
I believe a doctor, a good doctor, can summarize everything they know into a little package that an economist could look at and say, okay, I'll take your little package and I'll incorporate it with my vast knowledge of understanding how all the parts of the economy are connected.
Because, let's face it, let me give you a concrete example.
Let's say the doctor comes and says, we have three treatments, two of them look like they have really good possibilities, and it might save 60% of the people, but we think that this many people will get infected, and here's the risk, and here's the downside of the meds.
I think a doctor could tell the full doctor story, if it was the right doctor, and they could communicate well.
And put it in a little package.
That an economist wouldn't know all the background of it, but would have everything they needed from the doctor, and of course keeping working with the doctor, to know that they understood the little package that the doctor presented to them to plug into the bigger package of the economy.
I don't believe there's any situation in which an economist could do the reverse, which is put everything they know into a little package and say, okay doctor, Here's everything we know about economics.
Take your vast knowledge about this situation and plug my economic module into your database.
I don't think that can be done.
As evidence of that, there are so many different economic plans by people who have at least a little bit of knowledge of this stuff.
Let me give you some.
So Congress passed, you know, whatever that care relief package is, and it's got a whole bunch of details of things we're doing, and all the pundits are coming in and saying, hey, this part's bad, and this part's a giveaway, and this part's charity, and this part's unfair.
Are they right? Well, maybe a little bit right.
But compare a few different approaches.
So Steve Cortez, writing today...
So you can go see his suggestion.
And you should follow Steve Cortez anyway, because he's a great voice in all of this stuff.
So it's Cortez, C-O-R-T-E-S, I believe.
So he talked about an idea for suspending taxes on the middle class.
So if you're middle class, whatever that cutoff is, that you would just not have to pay taxes for a while.
Now, Steve, of course, has a background in business and this very field, so when he has an opinion, I'm more inclined to take it seriously than somebody who's a musician, for example.
But even I, I got a degree in economics and an MBA, and I don't know if that's a good idea.
I can't tell. Is that a good idea?
Because my immediate thought was, well, that'd be good for people with paychecks, But what about self-employed people who are in the same income?
There's no taxes to save.
They're not saving anything because they're not making anything, so they weren't paying any taxes for three months.
So you have that fairness thing until you get everybody.
Here's another one. So Joe Biden suggests three months of rent forgiveness.
Is that a good idea?
I don't know. I mean, and again, I have a pretty good background in this stuff, and I don't know.
I really don't. My own idea went like this, that for three months, nobody would pay for...
Nobody would pay rent, nobody would pay mortgage, and nobody would pay any of the big three of energy, well, maybe big four or five, and nobody would pay the monthly bills of energy and your Wi-Fi,
your phone, or whatever. And what I would do is, at the end of three months, everything would just turn back on, for rent and mortgage you just start paying after three months so the banks would still get you know all their money except for the three months they missed but they still get it all it would just be deferred three months so all they miss is the interest for the three months and and the thinking is this that anybody who is a landlord is probably but not necessarily a In better shape than the renters.
Meaning that if the landlord is the one who gets it in the neck, you're probably better off, societally, on average, even though not every case, than the individual renters getting screwed for three months.
So if you're trying to say, well, what's a little bit better?
A little bit better is screwing the landlords, not the tenants.
But are the landlords really screwed?
Because remember, they'll still get, you know, the money turns back on in three months, and they'll be back in business.
If you're rich enough to be a landlord, can you handle three months of no income?
Well, you probably can if you're not paying a mortgage.
Because remember, the landlord might have a mortgage too, and they don't have to pay it.
So imagine you're a Your healthcare continues, your power, your electricity, and you don't pay for them.
Could you get by?
Maybe so. Yeah, real estate taxes might have to be suspended, etc.
So, again, I can't evaluate these plans because there are too many moving parts and you'd really have to dig deeply and it would take a PhD thesis to tease out any knowledge about any of them.
But here was the simplest plan I heard.
This is somebody else's plan. Give $3,000 to everybody, regardless of anything.
And then for those who had a good year, a year from now, people who still made money and were still rich despite all of this, they would just have to give it back at tax time.
So there would be 100% payback of the $3,000, but only if you had a good year.
If you were rich last year, But you lost everything this year, you still give your $3,000.
And then at the end, when you go pay taxes, if you made up the difference and more, well, maybe you give it back.
But if you just got killed this year and didn't make any money, well, then you don't.
So what could be fairer or faster than just blazing a bunch of money out to every single pocket and then say, okay, if you're rich, you didn't deserve it.
It's like a three-month or several-month free loan But what's a free loan worth when interest rates are zero?
Not much. So you would be giving some rich people free loans for three months, but how much does a rich person care about a few months of not paying interest on $3,000?
It's irrelevant. It's completely irrelevant to a rich person.
So the rich people would just say, oh, that's a check I didn't need, and at tax time they'd say, okay, accountant, you're going to have to give that back.
Wouldn't that work? I'd like to see somebody who's smarter than me, and that's a lot of people on this topic especially, evaluate my plan of just, we just all, everybody just stops paying rent and mortgage, it doesn't matter what your income bracket is, for three months.
Just everybody stops. And then the things, I don't know if I said this, but I'll say it again, the things like your energy bill, you would have to pay them back But they would just translate it into a loan.
In other words, after the three months is up, they charge you what you owe for the new month, but a little 5% on top of it to make up eventually for the three months.
So you can just turn all of your monthly bills into effectively a loan.
It feels like that would be something, right?
How afraid would you be for the next three months Let me just put this out here, and you can tell me in the comments.
How worried would you be for your own safety and getting through this if you knew you didn't have to pay for any of your main bills for three months?
You didn't have to pay for any of them.
And you got $1,000 a person per month or whatever for food.
Basically, food is all you need to buy.
Right? Because almost everything else is sort of being pushed off.
Nobody's taking a vacation.
You're not even buying school supplies.
Basically, all of your expenses went to practically nothing.
You're just watching television, staying home.
A little bit of an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.
Here's one of the most interesting things I've seen.
So a congressman was contacted by a doctor who, in collaboration with the University of...
And by the way, this is just something I know from...
because I know the people involved who have seen this letter.
This is not news or anything, but probably should be.
So there's a doctor.
I won't name names, but there's a congressman who got contacted by a doctor who, in collaboration with the University of South Florida, Has figured out how to use something called a Raman spectrometer.
And I want to spell that because if anybody's listening and they're familiar with this equipment, this is kind of important.
So it's a Raman spectrometer.
R-A-M as in Mary, A-N as in neighbor.
Raman. Normally used for whatever this is, B and C panels in laboratories.
So it's an existing device.
It already is apparently widely used in laboratories.
And this doctor has modified it to identify the COVID-19 in saliva or other biological samples.
The claim is that it would provide a result in five minutes.
No chemistry needed.
Just dispose of the sample when it's done.
Five minutes, no chemistry.
Throw the sample away when you're done.
And all he asks is a thousand saliva samples so he can test the system.
Now, does this device work, and is it the answer to everything?
Well, if you're a betting person, I think the president said this about hydrochloroquine, if you're looking at any one thing, you should bet against it, right?
But we have a growing portfolio of things that I definitely wouldn't bet against every one of them, and it would only take a few of them to really move the curve here.
So this is one of them.
So I'll just tell you that if anybody knows how to get somebody a thousand saliva samples, tweet at me and maybe I can connect them.
But think about the potential of this.
And this just comes out of nowhere.
Which one of us was thinking, you know, there are probably some devices that are already widespread that can be modified to To make five-minute tests for COVID-19.
Who thought that was coming?
Who predicted that?
Except that we could all predict that human ingenuity would just be ramped up like crazy, like we've never seen.
I think that's what we're seeing. So I'll just put that out there as just one more thing that looks positive.
Here are the other positive things.
Was it Abbott?
I think Abbott, the laboratory.
Now has a device, a tabletop device, that can get your testing down to under 15 minutes, so you can find out before you go home.
Amazing. How quickly can they make these things?
Well, they're already in production, and apparently a lot of them.
The blood serum thing shows promise, as I mentioned.
And then the Trump pills.
Will the Hydra...
Let's talk about...
How likely it is that the Trump pills, which is what I call the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and zinc when given together, how likely is it that they will work?
Let us update our opinions.
The worst people in the world are going around this week and misinterpreting what other people said to blame them for being wrong in the past.
If you're doing that, you're just the worst person in the world.
You're useless. You don't understand what an emergency is.
You don't understand your role in it.
It's not that.
All right? So let me evolve and clarify my opinions about the potential of the Trump pills, the hydroxychloroquine in particular.
It goes like this.
There is no credible scientific evidence that it works.
All right? If you've said that, I think you're on the same side as every smart scientist in the world.
There is no credible, controlled study that says it works.
Now, there are studies that say it works, and in China, the one disinformation probably study says it doesn't work.
But none of them are quite the quality and the credibility that would make me say, oh yeah, that looks pretty good.
We're not there. And I would say you should not believe any smallish test coming out of another country.
We're in such massive, massive state of fraud and disinformation that if you hear that Elbonia had a 40-person study and all 40 of them are playing professional basketball two days later, just don't believe it.
Which doesn't mean it's not true.
Yeah, so the French studies in particular is what I'm referring to.
So there are studies, but you should really, really put your maximum skepticism on every study right now.
But here are some things we know that can help you make a decision even without certainty.
What we know is that in this country, Doctors are almost uniformly, at least everyone I've heard from, is either prescribing hydroxychloroquine or they're taking it prophylactically because they're working on the front lines.
Now, just because basically every doctor that we've heard from who has access to the drug is taking it, does that mean it works?
No, it doesn't.
But it does mean that all the people who are smarter than us, all the doctors, have looked at what they can look at.
They've surveyed the landscape, talked to the other doctors, and made a judgment.
And their judgment is that, well, downside isn't that big, but what if it works?
Maybe it works. So the fact that they're all using it is not proof.
Now what about the fact that basically every country that can hoard this drug is?
Because that's the case. India stopped export.
I think most countries are trying to hold their own supply close.
What does that tell you?
Well, it tells you at least at the government level, after the benefit of all the evidence, albeit not scientific, much of it anecdotal, a lot of it from the China experience, etc., All of the governments think it's important enough to protect it, and I don't think they're just doing it because they don't want to run out of rheumatoid arthritis or malaria drugs, because those are the other uses.
There's some other use to lupus, I think.
And I don't think that they're hoarding it and protecting it just because of lupus and arthritis, people who need it.
It looks like there's a fairly widespread opinion of the people most qualified to make this decision, That they think there's at least enough here to hoard it.
And then what about the anecdotal reports?
So, in my case, I personally know somebody who was in really bad shape, who got the drug, and within 24 hours, it was obviously better.
Now, I don't mean all better.
I mean, you know, something like 20-30% better the next day.
And then it continued, and then the full recovery.
So, But that's anecdotal.
And there are lots of other people who have the story of, you know, this grandmother did this and she was on death's door and, you know, she took the pill and now she's fine.
But you can't really believe all the anecdotal stuff.
What you can look at is that all the anecdotal stuff is in the same direction.
So with the exception of, and fact check me on this, I believe there is one A strong piece of evidence against the hydroxychloroquine, and that's the disinformation study from China, so you just don't count that one.
But all of the anecdotal information, I think, is positive.
And the dog that isn't barking is that would we not know by now, would we not have also anecdotal reports of, let's say, a doctor in New Jersey, I'm just making this up, but wouldn't there by now be a doctor in New Jersey who had treated 10 people with that drug and three of them died or it didn't make any difference or he didn't notice anything that looked like a recovery?
Wouldn't we have some reports?
Of it not working, anecdotally?
The only report of it not working is the one we know we can't trust?
I think that's what doctors are doing.
That plus the fact that for short-term use, the downside is low.
If it works, it might save your life and lots of other lives.
So that's all we know.
And I'll bookend it by saying there's no credible evidence that it works.
That's what the President says.
That's what the experts say.
That's what I say.
There's evidence, but it's just not quite where we need it.
So it could be nothing.
However, these other things that are coming on from the blood stuff and the testing are just so positive that we have maybe...
I would say we have probably five different paths for success.
Meaning several different ways of testing, several different drugs.
Maybe we'll find out that we can test DNA and find out who's more susceptible.
We saw some evidence, and I don't think this is credible either.
So take this with a grain of salt, too.
But there were two studies showing that 60% to 80% of the people who died from the coronavirus were also quite overweight.
Is that true? Is it true that if you're not overweight, your risk of dying is, you know, small, relatively?
Wouldn't that be nice to know?
I don't think we can trust any of that.
Any of that to be true.
New York Times had an article today saying, hey, you know what?
You know, it feels like wearing a mask might make a difference.
Now, this was in response to the World Health Organization saying, you know, if you don't have symptoms, don't wear a mask.
You don't need that. And, of course, everybody with a lick of common sense said something like this.
Wait a minute. If there's such a thing as asymptomatic spreading, and it's one of the biggest problems, and we know that the mask stops things from being projected out of your mouth, how in the world could they not work?
Right? Because the asymptomatic spreader is still spreading through the mouth.
And if you've got a barrier over the mouth that keeps the distance that things spread lower, and even bad barriers apparently cut the virus by 75%, in what scenario does that not make sense to do it?
And there's some suggestion that Japan and South Korea went massively to the masks and it made a difference.
I don't think we know that yet.
But certainly, you know, Anecdotally, and commonsensically, but it took the New York Times to say, you know, maybe there's a reason you should wear a mask.
And I'm thinking, my God, my God, the quality of information and reporting is so bad that the greatest newspaper in the world took to today to tell you, you know, maybe a barrier over a thing would slow it down.
Really? We have to wait till today for that?
Somebody in the comments is talking about smokers.
Why is it we don't have the data on the demographics and the situation for the people who died?
Doesn't that bother you?
I feel as though we are being lied to.
Well, let me say this as clearly as possible.
Our government, the United States, is lying to us just grotesquely.
They're lying to us about the usefulness of masks.
Probably because there was a shortage.
I think they're lying to us about the potential for the hydroxychloroquine, probably because they don't want us to hoard it.
I think that they are wrong about some things and misleading about some things, taking their best guess on some things that may turn out to be wrong.
Here's what I feel confident about.
At least in our country, the government and the experts, I believe all of their intentions are good.
So in other words, I'm not too bothered by the government of the United States lying to me to prevent hoarding of a valuable good.
I don't love it.
I'm not comfortable with it.
It hurts. I might, you know, for myself, I'd rather know the truth.
But if you're saying, what's good for the country?
I don't know. Stopping people from hoarding a vital good is kind of important.
So if your government is lying to you with good intentions, and let's be honest, that's exactly what's happening.
Your government is lying to you massively with good intentions.
I can't hate that.
But I wouldn't believe any other government because they do not have good intentions about us.
But basically, everybody is lying to you or stupid, and I think that that's just...
I mean, look at the New York Times.
It's just sort of stupid that it took so long for them to say that.
All right. Let's see what else I got here.
My health club, so the club I usually go to for working out, my gym, just sat around and noticed, and I'm wondering how common this is.
They're offering two options for their members.
Now, the club is closed, of course, but they say they would like to keep their staff employed as long as possible.
And they've offered this option, which I think is kind of brilliant.
They said you can just keep paying your dues, and they would appreciate it, because that's the only way they can pay their staff during the thing.
But they've offered this option.
You can drop your dues to zero just by asking.
Just go to the website, click it, and say, I want to pay zero.
Or you can drop it by 50% so that some of the burden is off of you, but you still help to pay the employees.
Now, I know what you're going to say.
Is this really going to the employees, or is this more about the owners of the business that are in big trouble right now?
And the answer is, I don't know.
But I do love the fact that they gave all of us three choices.
How can I hate that?
One of my choices is to not pay them any money.
How can I get mad at that?
One of my choices is to help their employees, who I know, in many cases, and like, and would like to help.
And the other option is I just pay full price and help them ride it out.
Now, because I can, I have the wherewithal, I've decided to pay full price.
So I'm just going to pay full price because this gym and health club has been good to me for, I don't know, 25 years.
I do genuinely like many of their employees.
I know them personally quite well in a number of cases.
And so I'll just pay full price.
But it really makes it easier for me to do that because they made it easy for me to pay zero or easy for me to pay 50.
So from a psychological perspective, Community, you know, greater good perspective.
This feels kind of enlightened.
I mean, I don't know that they could have done this any better than this.
This is really good. I would recommend that other health clubs that are in the same situation, there must be a lot of them, should at least take a look at this idea.
Because the way it makes me feel is just totally right.
How it works out for everybody, well, we can be optimistic, but certainly a good try.
All right. I think that's what we've got for now.
I feel like there was one other thing that I promised somebody I would talk about today, and I want to make sure I didn't miss it.
Hold on. Just checking, checking, checking.
And I think I've, I think I got all my, hit all my points.
All right. Oh, yes, one more point.
Just to clarify something, there's a discussion about whether our hospitals or any of them are over capacity or are they handling RL. The reports we're getting is that even the most impacted hospitals are still not over capacity, meaning they're kind of close to capacity, but they're not over.
And as was pointed out, that in the 2018 flu, Hospitals were also over capacity for a little while.
So it's not unusual for just the regular flu to make a hospital over capacity.
But then somebody else who was smarter than me and all the other people talking about this said the following.
In 2018, when there was a regular flu, they had not also canceled all of the surgeries that were optional.
So you're comparing an apple to an orange.
If you're looking at the regular flu, cause some overcapacity, and that's a fact.
I believe that's a fact, at some hospitals.
But I believe those same hospitals were still doing a full schedule of all their surgeries and all their other business.
And that's not the case.
Today, the hospitals basically wipe the table clean of all normal business, the stuff you could put off, and they're still at capacity.
That is completely different, completely different than being at capacity with the overcapacity with the regular flu while you're also still doing your full menu of other stuff.
Alright, I just wanted to put that out there and say we're going to be great.
The level of human ingenuity and focus and good intentions on this is phenomenal.
When it's over, we're all going to be very proud to be Americans, to be humans, and we're going to be proud of what we did.
Because basically, all right, I'm sorry, I was going to sign off, but somebody said something in the comments that are fighting words, so you got me for another minute.
So I made an analogy on Twitter to make a point, and people who say to me, Scott, you're always saying analogies are bad, and you made an analogy, therefore that's loser think.
Let me defend it.
Here was the analogy.
It was more of a thought experiment.
If you were standing on the beach and you saw coming toward you a 200-foot wave, a tsunami, and you saw it.
You're not wondering if it's coming.
You're just looking at it. Oh, that's a 200-foot wall of water coming right at me.
What should be your reaction?
Should your reaction be, uh-oh, I think I'm going to be dead?
Or should your reaction be, I'm fine because I'm dry?
You see what I did there? I'm dry now.
I'm fine. Yeah, there's a 200-foot tsunami coming right at me, and I can see it.
I don't have to wonder if it's coming.
It's just right there. But I'm fine, because I'm dry.
Now, everybody who hears that knows, well, that's stupid, because the tsunami's going to kill you in a moment, so you better worry.
Now, of course, I'm helping people to think through their bad thinking When they look at, oh, the virus has not overwhelmed the United States yet, I just want you to understand it doesn't mean anything.
The fact that it hasn't overwhelmed us yet doesn't tell you anything.
It doesn't tell you anything.
You're still dry, but that doesn't mean you're safe.
Now, it could be, and this would be a legitimate complaint, that if you don't believe that the scientists are right, that there's any tsunami coming at you, well, that would be fine.
That would be an actual legitimate opinion that could be right or wrong, and we'll find out later.
It is not a legitimate opinion to say, well, I'm dry now, so I guess everybody was wrong.
Now, if that's loser think, I don't know what isn't.
And I'll talk to you tonight at 7 o'clock Pacific, 10 p.m.
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