Episode 885 Scott Adams: Announcing my Candidacy for President of the United States
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
I'm your Backup Presidential candidate, Matt Gaetz for my VP
The TRUE purpose of social distancing in April
Chinese elite send their kids to American universities
Links and apps to address #coronavirus
Key questions SOMEBODY needs to ask the daily briefing
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It's time for another delightful episode of Coffee with Scott Adams.
It will be featuring the simultaneous sip.
Yes, it will. We will not be skipping that today.
I have a very special announcement as soon as you all get in here.
But first, for those of you who are fleet of finger, fast enough to get in here, people who are well prepared, people who are not going to work anyway, you might as well listen to me.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
Enjoy me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous hip.
Go.
Mmm, I can feel the death rates starting to decline already, because that's how fast it works.
Well, the big news of the day is, of course, I'm announcing my candidacy for President of the United States, effective today.
Now, there are some caveats.
The caveats are important.
Number one, I'm not going to fill out any paperwork.
So if any of that's necessary to be on the ballot, can somebody figure that out for me?
Maybe if there's something I have to sign, I could do that.
But I'm not really into the paperwork.
So I'm hoping somebody else can take care of that.
But here's the deal. I'm not going to be running as a primary candidate, meaning not your first choice.
I'm going to be running as a backup choice.
So if you liked, let's say, President Trump's job performance, and he's running and I'm running, you should vote for him.
That would be my first choice too.
You should vote for him. If you like what he's done and you think he's better than the alternatives, and even if you think I'm better than him, you should still vote for him.
So, if Trump is in the race, and he's healthy, and he's doing a good job, or at least as good as he's done so far, you should definitely vote for him.
You should give me no votes.
But, we're in very uncharted territory, and November's a long ways away.
People over 70 are not guaranteed to be healthy by November.
Some percentage of people over 70, and the President's over 70, May have some health difficulties between now and November.
Plus, anything could happen.
Perhaps the President does something that even his supporters don't like.
Hasn't happened yet, but it could happen.
So here's the deal. Democrats are not running a backup option.
Because it looks like it's going to be Joe Biden, and he's not really a backup option.
Forget about the policies.
He's just simply not capable Of functioning in that or any other job.
You wouldn't hire him to be a barista at Starbucks, would you?
I don't think you would. I mean, quite seriously, you wouldn't.
So, in normal times, your emergency backup president would be just whoever's running in the other party.
But right now, we don't have an emergency backup.
So I will be your Joe Biden emergency backup.
If you're a Democrat, and you don't want to vote for Trump, Well, you can vote for me.
That would make sense.
Biden's not going to win anyway.
So, give it a shot.
I promise you that if I get elected, I will make a plan for covering everybody with health care.
But it'll be more of a capitalist plan to get there.
It may not be on day one.
So, if you're a Democrat, and you want improved health care, and you don't really have a candidate, because Joe Biden really isn't one, And you think Trump isn't quite what you need?
Well, I'd probably be a little bit better on health care.
So vote for me. But if you're a Republican, just vote for Trump.
Now, in the unlikely event that Trump is, I don't know, maybe he retires or he's unavailable or something happens, here would be the people I would nominate for my administration.
Just so you know what's ahead.
First of all, I would need a A good vice president because I would plan to work from home and I don't do meetings.
So I might not be the best president because I'm not going to go to meetings.
I'm not going to travel. Not too much about paperwork.
So I would appoint as my vice president somebody who could immediately take over.
I mean, the first day of the job.
I would just say, hey, vice president, I don't really like this job anyway.
Why don't you do it?
And I may or may not step down, which would be optional.
I'd just say, you know, I'm not really into all this presidenting stuff, frankly.
I'd rather do something else.
So I need a strong vice president.
So I think I'll pick Matt Gaetz as my vice president.
He doesn't have to agree with this.
We'll just draft him.
And the theory is, Most candidates pick a vice president who's sort of the weaker version of themselves, so you're never confused about who the best person is from the top of the ticket.
You know, Mike Pence, very solid.
I think he's one of the best vice presidents just because he doesn't make mistakes.
But he's not as exciting as President Trump, right?
So that's the right way to do it.
You want just a solid vice president.
But in my case, since I have no qualifications for the presidency whatsoever, I would reverse that.
So I would pick a vice president who could actually do the job better than I could.
I figured Matt Gaetz has policies which are, as far as I know, almost completely compatible with mine.
And he's a well-known Republican, so you might like him.
So I would draft him as my vice president and immediately put him in charge upon my election, because I don't think I'd like to do the actual work.
Of course, here are some of the rest of my cabinets and appointees.
I would appoint Adam Townsend as governor of Greenland.
He might have to conquer it himself, but I don't know.
How hard would that be? Do they even have weapons up there?
Mark Schneider, of course, Secretary of Energy.
Carpe Donctum, Secretary of Memes, obvious.
Secretary of Defense, I think Mike Cervich.
Mike Cervich, Secretary of Defense under my administration.
Of course, Naval Ravikant, Secretary of Higher Awareness.
We got Balaji Srinivasan, maybe FDA. He can take his pick.
And of course, you know, Jack Posobiec probably wants to be Secretary of State, but if there's something else you want, you can have that too.
So that would be an idea of what my administration would look like.
All right. One thing about this coronavirus thing is that it really shows you who's useful and who is useless.
And I saw a headline today that actor John Cusack is saying we should try again to impeach President Trump.
And I'm thinking to myself, well, I don't think you could design a more useless person if you wrote a movie script and said, alright, we're going to do a movie, and we're going to write a script, and the script is about the most useless person in the universe.
What could be the most useless thing you could do in the middle of a crisis?
About impeach the president.
John Cusack, if you're writing a movie script on how to be the most useless person in the universe, you're on a good track.
All right. Here's a question for you that I would not have asked weeks ago.
So there's some indication, of course this is anecdotal, some indication that the hydroxychloroquine, if given early to people who have symptoms, or even maybe before they do, Could be effective.
And there's some thinking, again, anecdotal, it's not proven, that it might be the most effective if you give it to them early on in the symptoms, and then they won't progress to needing a ventilator.
So that's unproven, but anecdotally that looks to be the case.
And so I ask myself, is that the way we're testing it?
So we know that there are a number of trials going on, different drug trials.
But are we trialing hydroxychloroquine for people who are just getting symptoms?
Or are we only testing it for people who are already in bad shape, where there's some indication it could help, but not nearly as much?
Now, again, if this were a few weeks ago, I would have said, well, obviously we're doing both.
Duh. You know, if you're doing multiple drug trials, you're going to do the obvious ones.
So, one trial where you give it to them early, one trial where they get it later, but...
You're going to try both of those things.
However, having seen the massive incompetence from our professionals so far, here I'm talking about the World Health Organization, the CDC, the Surgeon General telling us that masks are not a good idea when you knew they were.
So if we had not just witnessed obvious and unambiguous massive lying and incompetence, I would have said, well, you can count on the fact that they're doing the right kind of drug trial, right?
But as of today, I'm not so sure.
So this is something I would like a fact check on.
Ideally, the task force would tell us today.
Is there any trial of the hydroxychloroquine that does not focus on people who are already bad off?
Is there any trial of the people who are taking it early?
I don't need results yet, although I would think we might even have some preliminary results.
But are we not even testing that?
Because there's part of me that's a little bit worried that we're not even freaking testing it.
And only because of the massive incompetence I've seen so far.
Otherwise, I wouldn't even question that.
So I'd like an answer on that today.
Um... Oh, and in my tweet, I said something that is medically probably a terrible idea, which is that maybe people should be getting the azithromycin and the hydroxychloroquine before they have symptoms.
But somebody in the comments pointed out that if you're taking an antibiotic, the azithromycin part, you might just cause the virus to become resistant.
So it probably doesn't make sense to take an antibiotic until you actually have symptoms.
But it might make sense, and again, this is a question, not a statement, to take the hydroxychloroquine ahead of any symptoms.
Because that one's not an antibiotic, per se.
Alright, so there are two problems with the pandemic models that I can see.
Number one, I mentioned last night in Periscope, if you're throwing the New York data in with the rest of the country data, and then averaging it, You get an average that doesn't mean anything, because it's like averaging an apple and an orange.
So really you should look at New York by itself as if it's the only country and the rest of the country, because the rest of the country is not nearly as bad off.
So if you're projecting what's going to happen by throwing New York into the mix, it's probably skewing the average in a way that is misleading.
And I think that's true.
I would need some confirmation, but I think that's true.
But then some other smart people pointed out another problem with the model.
And this is a pretty big problem.
Which is that the models say that after the end of the quarantine or the social distancing, that our number of deaths will be way down.
And that's the good news.
It would trend towards zero.
Except the experts say, what happens as soon as you stop doing social distancing?
The minute you stop it, Doesn't it just go right back up?
In other words, if the social distancing is doing nothing but delaying the bump, you have exactly the same amount of deaths.
You just spread them out.
Spreading them out is a good thing in and of itself because of hospital capacity.
But does it affect the total number of people who die?
Or is that just going to be the same because there's just nothing we can do in the next 18 months or however long it takes to get a vaccination?
That's a pretty good question.
And if you don't deal with that, then any of these numbers about total number of people who are going to die are just nonsense.
Because it's based on magic.
And the magic would be after the social distancing is over and everybody just goes back to work.
The magical assumption is that the pandemic doesn't just start right back in again exactly like it was.
Why wouldn't it? There's no reason it wouldn't.
Not a single reason that it wouldn't.
But, here's the hope.
If we slow it down, we can first of all, it's a gigantic big deal to slow it down, even if it's the same number of total deaths, because you at least can get your hospital capacity a little bit more under control.
But maybe those other meds are a big difference too.
Maybe we'll know more from the drug trials.
So I would say that it's a stalling technique to find out which of the meds work.
That feels like that's what that is.
And I don't think that's been explained.
So I think I'm explaining it to you better than the experts because you have to know what comes after, what happens when everybody goes back to work.
If there's no plan for that, there's no plan.
All right. So...
Balaji Srinivasan has this suggestion, which I think is pretty good.
We might be in sort of a semi-permanent world where face masks are going to be important.
So even after this pandemic passes, we might have lots of future needs for face masks for a few weeks every year or something like that.
And so Balaji says, well, why don't we make them cool?
Why don't you build some stuff into them?
Make a high-tech face mask.
Maybe it's got your phone in there.
Wouldn't you like to have a face mask?
I've always thought this would be a good idea.
Like a high-tech face mask, not a cloth one, but something more substantial where you could put some electronics in it, whatever.
Could you make one in which you could talk, but only the person on the phone, and you've got a microphone in there, but only the person on the phone could hear you?
So in other words, could you be wearing a mask, having a regular conversation with somebody on the phone through your mask, but people in the room can just hear a little murmur?
Maybe it doesn't bother them so much.
And maybe you could put some heads-up display, some not virtual enhanced reality stuff.
So make it cool.
Maybe. All right.
Let us compare what experts told you and when...
To what a cartoonist told you and when.
Okay? Every now and then it's good to say, well, how did the experts do compared to the non-experts?
And that doesn't mean that the very next time you should only listen to the experts or only listen to the non-experts.
Really, this is just one data point.
But every now and then you should stop and say, alright, how did the experts do?
Just sort of keep a running tally so you know when to be skeptical and when not to.
Let me give you some examples.
Who was the first expert who said we should close the airports, the flights from China?
Was it the virologists?
Or was it me?
It was me.
It was me. So I was way before the experts saying we should close flights from China.
Right? I mean, you could check that.
January 24th.
But was there anybody before me who was an expert?
I'm not aware of any. I'm aware of Jack Posobiec said it before me that we should close the borders, and he's not a virologist.
So just on that one scale of should we close the airports, I would say the experts were following the non-experts.
And you can verify that.
I mean, there might be some expert who was saying it before me, but check that.
How about the question of whether masks were useful or not useful in the pandemic?
Who said first that masks are probably useful because, duh, was it the experts, the CDC, the World Health Organization, your Surgeon General, and your task force?
Was it them or was it me?
The answer is me.
Way before the experts admitted it, I told you masks clearly, obviously, duh, make some difference.
And now the experts pretty much are all agreeing.
So I was before the experts on closing the airports, before the experts on the efficacy of masks.
Where did you first hear in public that hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug, might be useful if taken early?
Now, I'm not the person who invented that idea.
Of course, that did come from the experts.
But where did you hear it first?
Probably from me. Right?
Now, some of you might have heard it from somewhere else.
But probably most of you heard it from me.
Now, again, that doesn't make me right or wrong.
We still have to test it, and who knows if it'll work or not.
But it's a very important part of the conversation.
Everybody agrees with that.
And you probably heard it first from me.
At least the people watching this periscope.
What about convalescent blood therapy?
Where was the first place you heard of that as something that could work?
Well, it's an old technique, so there are people who are aware of it and certainly in small groups and maybe in small ways were talking about it.
But I'll bet you heard it first from me.
Now, I didn't make it up.
I heard it from Ian, whose last name I can never pronounce.
You know who you are, Ian.
You're probably watching. But You probably heard that from non-experts before you heard that from experts.
Alright, here's another one.
Experts are telling me that it might be dangerous to give people these malaria pills and hydroxychloroquine before they have symptoms.
And the reasoning is that under certain conditions, if you have heart issues, I guess, maybe something else, the pills could kill you.
So that's what the experts are saying.
In fact, even this morning, a medical expert told me this.
He said, you don't want to give these just to everybody willy-nilly because the pills themselves could kill people.
And we know that if they have certain conditions.
To which I say to the experts, was that a problem when you prescribed different lupus, which you do every day?
Is that a problem when you prescribe it for rheumatoid arthritis, which you do every day?
Is that a problem when you prescribe it for malaria before people even have malaria every day?
So, experts, why are you telling me that this is a problem when it's something that's been done for decades for other conditions, and of course you have exactly the same warning?
It doesn't matter if you're getting it for lupus or malaria or rheumatoid arthritis.
It's going to come from a doctor, and the doctor is going to say, do you have one of these conditions?
If you say yes, maybe you don't get it.
If you say no, maybe you get it.
It's no different than all the other uses.
So, who would you listen to?
The doctors and the experts.
Who say, I don't know, this pill could be dangerous.
Or the non-expert who's telling you, yeah, it could be dangerous.
We know that, and it's no different than every other use.
Who are you going to believe, me or the doctors?
I would go with me, honestly.
I would. All right, here's another one.
How much DNA testing is being done of the people who have the worst outcomes versus the ones who do not?
Is anybody doing that?
Which expert is telling you, yeah, we better start testing DNA and get ahead of this and find out if there's anything about some people that makes them more susceptible?
I'm not aware of any. Are you?
Do you think a month from now that nobody will be testing DNA to do exactly what I just said, find out who's most susceptible?
I guarantee it.
In a month, your experts will be saying, hey, I got an idea.
Why don't we test for DNA? Now, again, this isn't like my original idea.
I got this from people who are smarter who work in this field.
But you probably heard it from me.
So here's my point.
Even though I'm not the original creator of any of the stuff I told you, except the mask stuff was obvious, I'm not the creator of it, so I'm not the original expert for it, but where are you hearing it from?
If your experts have a lot of knowledge, but they're not telling you that knowledge, or they're telling you the opposite of that knowledge, it doesn't really help you that they have that knowledge.
You also need to be communicating it accurately.
So, I would say if you're looking at this whole situation, and you were being even a little bit objective, and you said, who gave you better information about this medical situation?
It would be me. I'm not even a little bit unconfident about that opinion.
Right? I think you'd agree.
All right. Let's see.
What else we got going on here?
I've come up with an idea that's a little half-baked, and maybe somebody can help me with this.
You know that my startup created its own crypto token.
Lots of people did this in the past.
But once you create a crypto token, it just sort of lives forever.
You don't have to close it or do anything.
You create the token, and it just lives on the internet forever.
And I don't think it can ever change.
I suppose anything could happen.
So the when is a token that exists on the internet and will live forever no matter what you do.
But like most cryptocurrencies, its value starts out optimistically and then it drops until it becomes vanishingly small.
I don't even know what it is at the moment.
But here's my idea. The reason that dollar bills are valuable is that the government backs them.
The full faith and guarantee of the government is what makes your US dollar worth something, because you know that if everything else went wrong, at least the government would take it when you pay your taxes.
So there's always a market for a dollar, if only the government collecting taxes.
But with cryptocurrency, if you can't guarantee that someone will ever want one, then its value drifts to zero.
So here's my idea. I'm going to peg the value of the when to one roll of toilet paper.
So that one roll of toilet paper will become the backing.
Now here's the part I haven't quite figured out.
I have to be able to figure out some way that you could legitimately trade some when and actually get a roll of toilet paper.
And actually get a roll of toilet paper.
Somebody says, worst periscope ever.
Well, you won't have to ever listen to another one.
Good for you. So if anybody can figure out how to do that, maybe it would require an actual warehouse full of toilet paper.
And so here's the other part of the deal.
You could distribute the WEN, which at the moment is worth nothing, virtually nothing, to poor people.
And then all the poor people would say, oh, I've got these cryptocurrencies, but it's not worth anything.
And then a big toilet paper company could say, we're going to peg the WEN to a roll of toilet paper.
And we'll actually mail it to you.
So if you send us some of the WEN, we'll send you some rolls of toilet paper.
The moment there was an exchange, so that you knew that a WEN could be exchanged for actual real toilet paper, the WEN would have value.
And the moment it has value, all the poor people who got some Would suddenly have money.
Because they wouldn't have to use it for toilet paper.
They could trade it to someone else who did need toilet paper.
Now, this is a half-baked idea.
I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with this.
And how practical is it?
You need some big toilet paper maker with a warehouse to sort of back it.
But I think it would make a whole bunch of poor people rich.
Or at least give them enough to buy food.
You just distribute them a bunch of wen because we got lots of them.
They're not doing anything.
And just turn it into money by backing it with toilet paper.
So somebody tell me why that's a bad idea.
Alright, I put a survey up on the internet in which I asked the following provocative question.
Do you think China will kill more people with which of the following methods?
Will they kill more people with fentanyl?
Because of course they allow their dealers to send it to the cartels who turn it into fentanyl pills and it kills Americans including my stepson.
So that could be 40,000 to 70,000 Americans per year.
So will they kill more people with fentanyl?
And keep in mind this is all intentional.
Because the government of China could stop that anytime they want.
They actually know who the fentanyl dealers are.
Even 60 Minutes interviewed one of the top ones.
The top one. So if 60 Minutes can find you in China, I'm pretty sure the government knows who you are too.
So that's one number.
The coronavirus, well, we don't know yet.
It could be 200,000 dead.
It could be 2 million. That could get up there pretty fast.
How about climate change?
If China is the biggest contributor to climate change, what would the Green New Deal people say in terms of the number of people who will die because of China specifically?
Now, of course, it takes everybody polluting to get the result you got, but if one of them is the biggest polluter, you could probably say, well, a quarter of the deaths are attributed to China or something like that, right?
So how many would that be? How many people do we think will die from climate change over the next 100 years?
And would, let's say, 25% of those deaths be attributed to China?
That's the question. How about the organ transplants?
So as you know, it's alleged with high credibility that they use prisoners, probably political prisoners, and they kill them on demand to sell their organs.
To people who are buying their organs, both from China and from other countries.
Now, because of the coronavirus, a lot of people are going to have their lungs destroyed.
There's already information that China may be executing prisoners just to take their lungs and hearts and transplant them into people who would be willing to pay for it.
Because apparently people will pay a lot for an organ.
So how many Uyghurs and Falun Gong, whatever that is, how many dissidents and political prisoners will be used for parts?
Will that kill more than fentanyl or coronavirus or climate change?
I don't know. So that's the question.
Now, a suggestion that I've heard a few times is that for every American death caused by China, We should kick out of the country any Chinese citizens that are, for example, going to our universities.
Apparently that's a big deal for Chinese elites to send their kids to American universities, the Ivy Leagues.
So that would hurt quite a bit, because the elite really have a pretty big incentive to send their kids to American high-end colleges.
So you could just say, it's nothing personal.
It's just nothing personal.
We're just going to go in alphabetical order, and we're just going to send one student home for every death.
And we can just do it weekly, batch them up and say, okay, well, there's a thousand fentanyl deaths.
And we think 400 people died from coronavirus.
So we'll send back 1,400 Chinese citizens who are using this country for a variety of things.
It could be rich people who just have houses here.
We could send them back and confiscate their houses.
We could take their stock.
So if they own any assets in the United States, we could just say, all right, well, it's nothing personal.
We're just doing this in alphabetical order.
And literally just start with A.
And just start sending them back in alphabetical order.
And the thinking here would be, if your letter F, you know, if your last name in China starts with an F, and you're watching the A's go home, and then the B's go home, and the C's go home, well, the elites who are letter F and beyond are going to say, holy cow, they're not kidding about this.
My kid is going to be sent home from, I don't know, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, wherever, and that's it.
They're not going to have a Harvard education.
He's just going to come home.
So would they start saying, maybe we should not be sending fentanyl to the United States?
Would the elites say, look, this is now bad for me.
It was okay when it was only bad for dead Americans.
I didn't care, said the Chinese elite.
But now it's affecting me.
So maybe we should rethink it, because I want my kid to go to an Ivy League school.
So I think...
If we were to do this, we should do it by formula, and it would be cold and effective to just do it in alphabetical order.
Because alphabetical order is such a strong message that it's not personal.
Because it isn't. It has nothing to do with the individuals who are getting kicked out.
It's just numbers.
And if you want to keep killing us, China, Well, we'll just send one home.
We're not even killing yours.
I mean, I would say that would be a mild response, wouldn't you?
For every person they kill, all we're going to do is send somebody home.
That's a pretty mild response.
I don't even think that that's extreme.
So we could be doing that.
My CTO from my startup, Nick Caliani...
He was trying to figure out a way to help things with the coronavirus, and so he's using his technical expertise to put together a virtual online summit for blockchain development, ideally for, at least the primary purpose right now, is for any apps that might use the blockchain They would have some immediate healthcare and or coronavirus solution.
So it's a general platform for people who want to learn a little bit more about blockchain development for the purpose of developing some kind of a useful app.
Now, it doesn't have to be for that purpose.
You could just go there for general information.
But I tweeted it in my list of online sources.
So it's a pinned tweet that has all the different links to different things.
I'll talk about those in a minute.
But one of them is the Block COVID Online Summit.
So if you can't find the link, just Google.
Google Block COVID Online Summit.
Or you could go to at Block COVID and you'll see the links and stuff.
So I tweeted and I said it's pinned to my account.
I asked for people to put in links to To various apps and websites and stuff that would be useful for the crisis.
So some of the ones I know about, just to tell you what's going on, so besides the one I just mentioned, there's the projectn95.com where buyers and sellers of this PPE can find each other.
So that's a good one. There's one I put on there, and again, you can find the actual links on my pinned tweet.
There's a link to...
Some people where you can take your temperature every day, just on your own, and then you enter into the app or the website your temperature.
And the idea is that as anybody gets elevated temperatures, you might be able to identify hot zones.
So, you know, if you found that, let's say, the people in my zip code suddenly started to, you know, inch up in temperature, maybe you've got a problem there.
So those are just some of the many ideas, and a lot of people have submitted links for that.
So go take a look at that.
All right. By the way, if you're wondering why you would use blockchain as opposed to other technologies for any kind of apps, some of the advantages are that it's a distributed system, so you don't need to build a database.
You know, the data just sort of lives distributed in the internet.
Some of it is privacy.
Some of it is it's easier to do things across borders.
So you don't have to worry about the banking regulations, etc., if you're just moving, you know, Blockchain and tokens and stuff.
The governments aren't too involved in that.
So those are some of the benefits.
I'm no expert. All right.
Here is the question which is so missing, which is this.
Here's a question for the reporters today for the task force.
Are you ready? I'm pretty sure that there are some reporters who watch these periscopes.
And here's what I'd suggest.
As a question for the next press conference, Mr.
President and Mr.
Vice President, are you already taking hydroxychloroquine?
Are the members of the task force who, by the nature of their job, do have to sort of meet in rooms and they can do their social distancing, but I'm pretty sure the President is not staying six feet away from people.
I just don't know if it's even practical for him to do his job.
So the question I would ask is, are they already on hydroxychloroquine and why not?
Why not? If you don't see that question asked today, I will be amazed.
Because as soon as you hear the question, you say to yourself, oh yeah, you've got to ask that question, because it's a yes or no, and we'd like to know, etc.
Here's the related question.
Are we aware of anyone in the United States who is a medical professional who Who is taking the hydroxychloroquine in advance of an infection.
In other words, just in case.
Who also went on to have to be on a ventilator.
Even one. Is there any, even one person, who fits that description?
Now this is not a scientific study, obviously.
But I am assuming that by now we have many thousands of healthcare workers who probably...
Anecdotally, we're hearing reports of this, probably are taking it prophylactically, in other words, in advance of having a problem.
So if we have thousands of healthcare workers, and we know that some number of them, unfortunately, are going to get infected, no doubt about it, because they're just too close to it all the time.
So of the people who got the infection, Who are also taking the drug before they got the infection, do we have even one case where it progressed to needing a ventilator?
Because enough time has gone by, right?
Where if that number is zero, it's still not a scientific test, you can't take it to the bank, but I'd feel a lot better, wouldn't you?
I'd feel a lot better if I knew that that number was zero.
And if it turns out it's one or two or whatever, then I'd start asking, you know, where there are underlying, any underlying issues.
So, those are the main things happening today.
Somebody there says they're taking a low dose.
You know, I don't know if that's a good idea, because then that's how you get into the hoarding.
Yeah, has Chris Cuomo said yet what meds, if any, he's taking?
That would be a good case.
And by the way, my hat's off to Chris Cuomo.
I hope that he continues working even as he has symptoms.
And I realize that people are going to say that's kind of showboating if he's coughing and trying to get through his interviews and stuff.
But on the other hand, It's real.
It's not showboating if it's real.
And if it's real and he's willing to keep working, I would be very interested in watching that programming.
I've told you before that watching Chris Cuomo interview his brother, the governor of New York, is just some of the best TV around.
I mean, it's just fascinating to watch that.
So I'd like to keep seeing him.
So best of luck to Chris Cuomo.
For a speedy recovery, but I hope that you stick with us and let us see the whole process.
And I hope it turns out well.
All right. That's about all I got here.
Not a fan of Scott, but would vote for Scott just on the weed thing.
Yeah, that's my promise.
I'll get the federal government out of the weed business.
States will still get to make some decisions, but I would get the federal government now.
And by the way, I'm pretty sure that Matt Gaetz would do the same.
So if you wanted to know what my policies would look like, I haven't matched them, but I've got a feeling that Matt Gaetz and I would be really, really close.
A lot of stuff from, you know, how do you address the Green New Deal To healthcare, to weed.
I think a lot of them are going to be really close.
I haven't checked, but I think so.
Yeah, I've heard of people who...
I know one person who hasn't gotten a test result.
It's been almost two weeks.
So this is somebody who actually waited and got the test, had the right symptoms to get the test, and two weeks have gone by without a result.
Two weeks! Now, Scott running out of gas?
Are you talking about me or the world?
Somebody says the antibiotics help with the secondary infection.
Yeah, so the reason that people take the malaria drug plus the azithromycin is that if they do get the virus, the azithromycin helps with the infection part Whereas the malaria drug sort of prevents your body from going nuts.
And then the zinc has some benefit too.
Let's see. What about the cruise ships?
Oh, let me talk about an idea.
I'm not sure if I totally understand this, but somebody on the internet was suggesting that if we don't have a better plan, that there's sort of an emergency backup plan.
So we hope we'll have a better plan that would have therapeutics and vaccines sooner than we think and stuff like that, but maybe not.
So the other plan is to put people in, let's say, put them in a hotel or put them in a cruise ship or put them in some place that they're only together and they don't leave, with the idea of intentionally infecting them.
So the idea would be to put groups, clusters of people who volunteered To say living in an apartment or a hotel or some identified space with the express intention of infecting them.
But to also infect them lightly so that they don't get the full dose which apparently makes a big difference.
If you're just marinating in the virus it will take over your immune system pretty quickly and you're in bad shape.
If you get a little trace of the virus And your immune system gets a little bit of warning before the virus gets too big, then it's a fair fight.
So there seems to be a big difference.
Whether you get a little bit of dose or a big dose, even though both of them can infect you.
So the idea would be to give people intentional small doses, treating them early, I assume.
This part I might be adding to the idea.
But let's say you give them hydroxychloroquine, if that works, and it works when you get early.
So you would build a group of people who all have immunity.
And then once they've all tested positive, but it doesn't look like they would spread it, then you just release them into the wild, and you've created a whole bunch of immune people, and you just do it again with another batch.
Now, would that work?
Or would that just spread the disease everywhere?
I don't know. It definitely falls into the category of, if you don't have a better idea, Maybe you try it.
It doesn't sound like the safest thing in the world for a variety of reasons, but what we're doing now might not be the safest thing in the world either.
Let's see. Just looking at your comments, some of them I don't want to read out loud because a lot of you have medical opinions.
I'm not sure I want to randomly spout the medical opinions I'm seeing in the comments, even if they're right.
Somebody says, this is the concept of a vaccine.
Well, not exactly, because a vaccine would be a non-deadly version.
You can't be a little bit pregnant.
Actually, you can.
With the virus, apparently you can be a little bit pregnant, meaning that you can have a low initial viral load versus a high one.
Now, on the same point, there was a story, was it in a Washington state, where there was a choir who decided to hold their choir practice.
Despite the fact that the coronavirus was becoming a bigger thing, but the state had not yet told people not to meet in groups.
So it was right at the end of when you could still meet in a group, and they did.
And the problem was they had their choir practice, of course, all in the same room, and I think there were something like 45 of them who ended up with the virus.
And the thinking, which sounds logical to me, is not just that they were in the same room, and not just that they did not do social isolation, they were close to each other, but there was some thinking that the singing itself might have been contributing, meaning that if you sing, you're exhaling more aggressively, and you're all standing together exhaling aggressively, because you're singing.
So that might have been the very worst situation you could possibly imagine where a bunch of people with no face masks are exhaling air in the same space for a couple hours.
I mean, it probably couldn't have been worse.
And sure enough, the results show it.
All right. Yeah, there's a Navy carrier with a bunch of infected people on it.
So we'll probably learn something from that.
As bad as that is.
I just saw MS and saw an article that DMDs can leave you with stronger resistance.
I don't know what a DMD is.
How are you certain that the virus is not on the surface of cans of food restocked?
Well, I assume it is.
I assume it is.
So everything has to be seen as...
As statistics and following the odds.
The odds of getting the virus if you're in a chorus that meets in one room and all sings really loudly and exhales seems to be very high.
So don't do that.
The odds of getting it from intense personal interaction with somebody has it, very high.
So don't do that.
But the odds of getting it because you took a walk in the park It's possible, right?
I guess. Because they say it can float around in the air, and who knows?
You stop and pet a dog, and it's on the dog.
So could you get it from a walk in the park by yourself?
The answer is, I guess.
Maybe. But the odds of getting it that way are so low that that would not be really contributing much to the viral spread.
In other words, if the only way anybody ever got it was taking a walk in the park, It would not reproduce fast enough to be viral.
So that's not the kind of risk that I would avoid, because taking a walk is good for you, too.
Likewise, your question was, how can you be sure it's not on the cans of food or the food itself?
And the answer is, it probably is.
Somewhere, in some grocery store, I'm sure it's on something.
I mean, the odds of that seem like 100%.
Somewhere, In the whole supply chain.
But what are the odds that you're going to get it that way?
So let's say your bag of groceries is delivered to you and you open it up and you take things out and you put them away, but you make sure you don't touch your face.
Maybe you're wearing a mask when you do it and you immediately thoroughly wash your hands after you've touched everything.
Do you then need to go back and swab everything down, like all your cans and wash with soap your vegetables and stuff like that?
Well, it would probably help, but I'm not going to do it.
Because the way I'm going to play the odds is, if something has a 90% chance of giving it to me, like attending a choir practice, I'm not going to do that.
If something has a Maybe a 1% chance of giving it to me?
I'll probably still do that.
And if everybody acted that way, and they avoided the 90% chance of getting it, but they did do the things that would give you a 1% chance of doing it, we'd still be okay.
Because it would bring the rate of reproduction down below, making more than one person sick.
So you can't reduce your risk to zero from your groceries.
You can do the obvious stuff.
Wash your hands, throw away the bag.
Throw away the bag and wash your hands.
But I don't know that the risk is so big that I would worry about that too much.
Now, here I am not giving you my personal medical opinion.
I am imitating a doctor who's working on the front lines who said, in his experience, he's now dealt with, I don't know how many hundreds of patients, that they all know where they got it, basically.
Not all of them. Not 100%.
But mostly they know where they got it, and they got it from a person, and they got it from a person that they interacted with.
What he's not seeing is people coming in and saying, I have no idea.
Where I got it, because I've been socially isolating and just taking walks.
So he's not seeing that.
And those people, of course, are handling groceries because they have to eat.
So if it's happening, it's not happening a lot.
I think we're safely, we can say that.
Yeah, even the garbage man and all that.
But my guess is that all the outdoor stuff is just not going to be your big problem.
I wouldn't use a water fountain, but that's about it.
Yeah, somebody has 90-year-olds in the house, so you wipe it all down.
Yeah, you know, if you've got people who are at special risk, then maybe you want to take it to another level, if only to make you feel better.
I mean, if it makes you feel better, it's worth it if you have the time.
Yeah.
All right.
Don't want to give up my reusable bags.
Are you cutting your own hair now?
Well, that's a good question.
Because when I thought this was just going to be a few weeks, I thought, well, there's a whole bunch of stuff you can put off for a few weeks.
But a haircut is not something you can put off for two months, if you're me anyway.
So I'm going to have to cut my own hair.
It looks like that's coming up.
If I don't see anybody in person, it's not going to make that much of a difference.
Stock market predictions.
Yeah, the stock market will be spotty and choppy and will just stay spotty and choppy for a long time.
So you're going to have days when it's up 5%, days when it's down 5%.
You're going to have some stocks doing well while some do poorly.
But in the long run...
A broad basket of stocks of the United States is probably going to be among your safest investments.
I don't give financial advice, and so you should not consider that financial advice.
But if you were Warren Buffett and somebody said, what should I do?
I think he'd tell you the same thing, which is I think he'd tell you there are no guarantees.
But if you wanted to look historically, and even based on current situation, what country is the safest place to park your money?
Probably the United States.
And if you're going to park it in the United States, what's the safest asset class to put it in?
Probably a broad-based basket of the bigger stocks in the United States.
