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April 3, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:39
Episode 889 Scott Adams: Simultaneous Sipping With a Cartoonist Who Needs a Haircut

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: China's "wet markets" and eventually opening up travel Coronavirus and people who are bad at math Hydroxychloroquine treatment for patients Experts have begun telling truth about mask benefits A back-to-work decision The WHO lied, the task force lied, the FBI lied --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time for your twice daily dose of coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip.
And if you would like to enjoy this simultaneous sip, perhaps you need A cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine today, the thing that makes everything better, including the coronavirus.
That's right. Including that.
It's a simultaneous sip.
Go. Ooh, yeah.
Better every moment. All right.
China is apparently keeping open their wet markets, the places where they torture animals to death and then eat them or something.
I don't know exactly what they're doing there.
But here's my proposition for the world.
We should never open up travel to China so long as they have their wet markets open.
Now, what would that cause them to do?
Well, they might close the wet markets so that they could have travel again with the United States.
Or they could admit that the virus didn't come from the wet market if they want to keep them open.
So, I think we should just make it not personal.
Nothing personal about this China.
No insult intended.
But as long as your wet markets are open, We're never going to have flights between the United States and China.
Never. Now, at some point in the near future, we're going to have the debate about reopening travel.
It might be a month from now. I don't know.
But let me tell you where I'm going to come out on this.
If the wet markets are still open, I'm going to go nuts if we open up travel.
I don't think I'll do anything else except complain about that.
So, are you with me?
We can't open up travel to China while they keep the wet market open.
That's a level of irresponsibility that takes them out of first world contention.
There's a certain set of behaviors that are just necessary to be part of the civilized world.
And that's not it.
That's just not it. So let's agree that no travel to China ever, ever, for the rest of time until they close the wet markets.
Now you might say to yourself, will that work?
Could we put pressure on China that way?
And allow me to tell a story from years ago.
This story won't tell you much about China, but I was reminded of it and it was funny.
It goes like this. A million years ago, when I was young, and I worked in the corporate environment at the phone company, I was in a cubicle environment, and this is so long ago that smoking was allowed indoors.
So I would be surrounded by people smoking cigarettes indoors, and I've got mild asthma, and it was just horrible.
It just smelled, and it was unpleasant.
I couldn't work with that smell.
But of course it was legal at the time, so I would talk to my boss and my boss would say, what can I do?
It's legal. It's allowed.
You know, what can I do?
So that situation persisted for a while.
And keep in mind that this was before I started Dilber.
I was just a guy in a cubicle.
And it's important to For the historical value of the story, you have to know that this was way before I was known for being persuasive.
That's important to the story.
So every day I would think, gosh, what am I going to do?
I can't put up with this.
And I've already asked management, and they said, we're not going to change it.
Well, one day... As luck would have it.
The corporate folks decided that we all had to sign off on some workplace safety documents.
And each person had to look at the documents and read them.
And then they had to sign that they understood the workplace safety rules and that they would implement them.
So it wasn't enough that you knew what they were.
You are basically committing that if you saw a workplace safety problem, that it was your job to do something about it.
And one of the things they required is that if a workplace is unsafe, that you should immediately inform management and then not go to work there.
So it was your responsibility to not work where it was unsafe.
It was only your responsibility to tell management that you weren't going to work there.
And then they need to change it.
So I get the document, and I'm looking down the list of known problems.
It was listing carcinogens.
And it listed tobacco.
Secondhand tobacco smoke.
So on the company's own documents, the official document that I had to sign to promise that I would comply with it, it said that if I was in a situation with secondhand tobacco smoke, I was in a dangerous workplace area.
So, I complied.
And I informed my management that I wouldn't be coming to work anymore until the workplace was created to be safe.
And I said, it's nothing personal.
I'm just going to use the company policy that says this is an unsafe workplace.
I mean, it's right here. I'm not making this up.
I'm reading it right off the page.
And I'm in one.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
There's no question about the data.
I'm sitting right next to a smoker.
So I said, I'll come back to work when it's safe.
So I went home. A day goes by, and my immediate supervisor calls and says, are you serious about this?
Or words to that effect.
And I said, why wouldn't I be serious about it?
It's the workplace policy.
I'm just following your own policy.
I can't go to work until it's safe.
That's your rule.
I'm not making the rules up.
He talks to his boss.
His boss calls me the next day, so this is day two, where I'm being paid, but I'm not going to work.
So far this is good for me, right?
My boss's boss calls and says, are you serious about this?
I said, yeah, totally serious about it.
I'm not coming back to work until the smoking is gone.
And then my boss's boss's boss called.
I may be remembering some of this a little approximately, but it was basically this story.
And said, are you serious about this?
And I said, yep.
And... About a day later, my boss called and said that they had rearranged the office and put the smokers in one place and they would have me in another place.
So I decided to go back to work because they moved me to a non-smoking part of the building.
And it was only maybe months after that that the whole company banned smoking indoors.
Now, part of what I did was make sure people knew my story.
Because the company buckled.
They had to. They had to.
What were they going to do?
It was their own policy.
It was in writing. And they just gave it to me and forced me to sign it at the risk of being fired if I didn't sign it.
Now what would happen after I told all the people in my office that they could just go home and get paid and they didn't have any chance of getting fired?
Well, that was the end of smoking at Pacific Bell.
So my point is that we can certainly tell China that we're not going to open up travel until their wet markets are closed.
We can do that.
Because you just have to make sure that they know you're not bluffing.
It's all about knowing you're not bluffing.
And let me tell you, I was willing to get fired.
I would have gone to the local newspaper.
I would have made it a national story to the extent that I could have.
So, remember I told you the difference between wanting something and deciding?
This is a perfect anecdote for that.
There were a lot of people in the office who wanted to not be around cigarette smoke.
But wanting it didn't do anything.
They could talk about it, they could ask for it, but they were just sort of wanting it.
I wanted it until I decided I wasn't going to have it anymore.
Once I decided, it was over.
I was not going to be around it.
Now, I might have lost my job, might have been big consequences, but I had already decided.
So that's the difference between deciding.
So if I had lost my job, that was the price I was going to pay.
But I had already decided. All right.
Yesterday there were 136 fewer deaths than the day before.
Let's see if we can keep that up.
I don't think we'll necessarily be low again today.
I imagine the numbers are going to pop around a little bit randomly for a while.
But that's a good sign.
Could be the beginning of the turn.
Never know. On Fox News, they said the unemployment rate after these 6-point-whatever-million people are added to unemployment was 4.4%.
That's not right, is it?
Did we just add over 6 million people to unemployment and the unemployment rate is still only 4.4%?
That can't possibly be right, right?
So I need a fact check on that because I thought it was around 10%.
Because if it's only 4.4%, I'm not sure we have a problem, right?
But if it's 10%, it's a pretty serious problem.
So let's fact check that.
That can't possibly be right that it's 4.4%.
And maybe the problem is that it's just going to keep getting higher, so maybe I shouldn't be too happy about that if it's true.
Here's You know my complaints about why the task force does not give us good reporting on ventilators and masks and PPE. And I dug into it a little bit and it turns out that one of the problems is that the hospitals either can't tell you or won't tell you or they're hoarding or they're lying.
So what do you do when you need to make decisions about what to do about ventilators and supply and all that, but you know all the information is bad?
It's just bad data.
Because people are lying, they don't know, they're hoarding, so everything you're getting is bad.
Here's what I would suggest.
I believe that you could estimate these things even without the hospitals, because you could take some averages.
For example, you could say, how many people does our model say will go into the hospital?
I think the model gives you a range, right?
The model says it'll increase this much in New York City.
That should tell you how many new patients you got.
Now, you know that if you get 100 patients, Maybe two or three of them will end up on ventilators, whatever the number is.
So you should be able to estimate.
If you know how many people are going to come in, you know what percentage of them are going to be on ventilators, and you know how many ventilators you have, you kind of have enough.
In any given hospital, you might be way off.
But if you were to sum them up, probably your mistakes might average out, so you get closer to a good number when you average out the peculiarities.
But at the very least, it would give you a directional number.
Now, as some have said, if they can add an adapter to double the number of people on a ventilator, I mean, those are big variables that could change everything, and we don't know how that plays out.
But let's have a number without that, just a raw ventilator number.
Could the Defense Procurement Act, the DPA, could the president say to all the hospitals, I'm the president, it's an emergency, and under the Defense Act, I order all the hospitals to give me these three pieces of data by the end of the day.
Maybe it's just an email address or whatever it is.
And just say, by the end of today, you tell me how many ventilators you got, how many are in use, and whatever data around that would be also useful.
Could the president force that to be done in 24 hours?
I think so. I think so.
Would all the hospitals give him accurate information?
Would some sandbag?
Yeah, of course. Of course.
Because it's human beings involved.
But you'd get in the ballpark.
Wouldn't you like to know if we're 60% of the way?
And let's say you're wrong about that.
It's not 60% of the way.
It turns out to be 50 or 70.
That's pretty far off, right?
Well, not really. For decision-making, it tells you you have to go as hard as you can.
Because whether we have 50% enough or 70% enough, it's not even close to enough.
But if it's 90% enough...
Maybe you say, alright, put a little energy into something else, because we're pretty close on that.
So, we need these numbers.
It's not a joke anymore.
We have to say the task force is incompetent if they can't give us these numbers by today, I would say.
I mean, they're already incompetent for not doing it yesterday.
And I'm not going to grade easy on this.
You know, I've got my compliments for things the President has done.
I think his decision-making has actually been quite good.
If you were to look at what you knew at the time, and then what decision you made, I think history is going to say that decision-making is quite good.
But there's something preventing the number of crunchers, or whoever's job it is, from giving the public useful information on these PPE and ventilators.
And that just needs to be fixed.
I can estimate it for you.
I mean, I could do it.
And I could get within...
A range or, you know, a field where it would be useful information.
It's not that hard. One of the things we're seeing here is that people are really bad at math, and it makes a difference in how you, and science as well, I suppose, it makes a difference in how you see the whole situation.
If you don't know anything about math or economics, you can be sort of blinded to the tricks people are playing.
And let me give you an example.
In the New York Times, they've got a story that says there are 2,200 ventilators left in New York State, and they expect to need 350 per day, and so they just took the 2,200 that they have available, And they said, alright, how many does 350 go into that in about six days?
So they said, well, we've got about a six days supply.
What's wrong with that calculation?
Anybody? Anybody?
Mueller? Mueller? The answer is, it doesn't calculate people coming off ventilators.
Because you don't use the ventilator and throw it away.
People are coming on and coming off.
So... If the number was, and it's not, but let's say the number was they get off ventilators in three days, well that completely changes how many days of ventilators you have.
If it's two weeks, well then you got a little more trouble.
I've seen estimates from nine to eleven days, some people saying seven, but let's say it's ten days.
You have to calculate that, right?
The New York Times, writing a feature article, just takes the amount available and divides it by the amount you need per day and says, well, it looks like about six days.
Are you kidding me?
A sixth grader would know that's not the right answer because people are coming off ventilators, too.
So, yeah, it's difficult to calculate, but let me finish the point.
So, by way of background, for years my corporate job was estimating and predicting and calculating things in the financial world and the technical world.
So that's all I did all day.
How accurate were my predictions?
Not very, because it turns out that predicting the future is kind of hard.
Kind of hard to predict the future.
But were my predictions useful just the same?
And the answer is yes. So if you don't understand this point, you're going to be very confused about what you see about numbers and decisions and stuff.
Here's the point. Accuracy is not what you're shooting for.
It'd be great if you could have it, but you can't be accurate about the future.
That's not a thing. You can only predict and hope you're accurate.
That's the best you can do. But it still tells you what to do and what not to do, even in its inaccurate form.
And I'll just keep using this example.
If you had a very inaccurate number, but it told you that we were somewhere between 0 and 30% of the number of ventilators we needed, that would tell you to do a major, major push to make more ventilators, even though your number is grossly, you know, approximate.
Likewise, if it was more like over 90%, you would make a different decision about where to put your resources.
So you don't have to be that accurate.
And the other thing is that people who are good at this can pretty quickly work through reasonable estimates.
So for example, I'll give you an example from my budgeting days.
So I would go to each department head and I'd say, give me your budget for the coming year.
And then I would take all their budget information to my boss, and the boss would look at it and say, okay, cut it by 20%.
Just cut everybody by 20%.
Now, you think that's stupid, right?
Because all the department heads told you what they needed.
So if you cut it by 20%, they can't do their jobs, right?
Well, here's where experience comes in.
Because what I knew, and what my boss knew every time, Is that the department managers would be padding their estimates so they'd have too much because they don't want to have too little.
And we know because human nature is human nature that the department heads are not so dumb that they're going to double asking what they asked for last year unless they had some good reason.
So you know they're not going to like cheap by doubling it because human nature, it would be too obvious, etc.
You know they're not going to just increase it by 10%.
Because they're going to try to get a little more than that.
So human nature is they're going to pick a number to pad it by that they think they can get away with, the biggest number they think they have a chance of getting away with, and big enough that if it got reduced a little bit, they'd still be okay.
What is that number? Well, let me tell you from experience.
It's usually around 20%.
If you were to just randomly, you know, survey a bunch of people in that position and say, all right, you know, how much do you think you're going to pad it?
You'd probably find that on average people would pad it about 20%.
Now, do I know that?
Do I have data for that?
No, not at all. It's basically just something an experienced person would know automatically because you just see it and you see it and you see it until it's just obvious that that's what's happening.
So likewise, with this ventilator situation, if you told me, tell me how many the hospital says they have, I would probably in my mind say, well, that's probably the least number they have.
They might have padded that a little bit because they don't want to run out.
So in this case, they would pad it low.
In other words, they tell you they had fewer ventilators than they really have.
Once you sum up all those numbers, a good estimator would say, you know, if we take the numbers at face value, it looks like this.
But common sense says they may have padded it a little bit, and then you might figure that in.
All right. Now, because it's life and death, you wouldn't want to try to cut it too close to the edge.
You're still going to want to have more ventilators, not less.
But these approximate numbers do give you some sense of what you should be doing.
According to Josh Rogan's tweet, scientists don't rule out that an accident...
And a research lab in Wuhan might have spread the deadly bat virus.
So I don't believe that there are any serious people saying that it looks like it was intentional, which is different from saying it's engineered.
So the virus could be engineered, and it could be natural, but nobody's saying that China would be dumb enough to say, oh, this is a good idea, let's release this in our own country.
So I don't think anybody thinks that happened, at least...
The people who are experts at this sort of thing.
But it's still out there.
And now that, of course, plays into the wet market question.
If we know that other viruses came from the wet market, you still have to close it.
So independent of whether this one came from the wet market or it didn't, you still have to close the wet market.
That just has to be done.
There's another French study about the hydroxychloroquine, which is less good.
So most of you heard that one study from France that looked like the hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin and zinc was really effective in keeping people off of ventilators.
But another study where they only gave it to people who were in bad shape showed that it did not reduce the virus.
And that suggested to the researcher who did it that it probably doesn't work at all.
Because if it worked even a little bit, You would see it even with the sickest patients.
So in other words, it would make sense that it helps the less sick people a lot, but you should still see a big effect even if it doesn't save their lives.
You should see the virus go down on the more sick people.
The study was limited to sick people.
But here's the thing.
I'm not a doctor.
But isn't there something wrong with this?
If what he was basing this on was measuring the virus load?
Because my understanding, and here's where I get into trouble, Dr.
Drew, if you're going to watch this, send me a message later and tell me how completely wrong I am.
So everybody with this warning, I don't know what I'm talking about.
So you get that, right?
I'm going to talk about some medical stuff and I don't know what I'm talking about.
So put that caveat in your head.
My understanding of why this coronavirus thing was killing people is not because there was a lot of virus, but rather there was something about some people's lungs and their condition and maybe their ACE2 receptors or something about their lungs.
That would cause your own body to go into some kind of a storm that basically it would be your defense mechanisms going haywire that is the thing that kills you.
Now, my understanding is that the hydroxychloroquine is supposed to reduce the risk of your own immune system going nuts.
Now here's the part I need to fact check on.
Is the assumption of why the hydroxychloroquine works that it reduces virus?
Because I didn't think that was the assumption.
I thought the assumption of why it worked is that it reduces the reaction of your body as opposed to how much virus there is.
So if this researcher said, well, I don't think the hydroxychloroquine works because we didn't see it reduce the virus, But he was already working with people who maybe were too far gone.
Does that tell you anything?
And so my question is...
Yeah, that's the word I was looking for.
It's cytokine.
Cytokine. C-Y-T-O-K-I-N-E. Storm.
And that... That has something to do with your body's own defenses going into some kind of a spiral that is bad.
Alright, somebody says incorrect, and then somebody says correct.
Somebody says you are correct, and somebody says yes, it reduces virus.
Somebody says Noah kills the virus, somebody says yes and no.
Alright, so that's why we do a fact check.
The other thing I'm not sure about Did the second study show the cocktail?
I think it did, right?
The azithromycin? But I don't know.
Anyway, so I'm just going to put that out there that I don't know if the two studies were comparable.
But there are now two studies I know of that shows it doesn't work.
So if it turns out that the hydroxychloroquine doesn't work, don't say nobody told you.
Because there are two studies that suggest it doesn't.
At least two. There might be more.
But one of them is the Chinese study that has no credibility, because it's a Chinese study.
And the second one is this one, which I'm not sure they compared apples and oranges, so I don't know if it's telling us what it should, but it should worry you that the virus did not reduce.
All right. I was already worried about the following thing happening, and it already happened today.
Like, there's some things you can just predict about human nature.
Humans are just, sometimes we're awesome, but sometimes we're just terrible.
And here's a prediction I made about human nature.
So, I have made for some time the prediction that the total net, keyword net, Deaths from the coronavirus would be 5k or less.
5,000 or less. Now you say to yourself, but Scott, 6,000 people have already died.
So you're already wrong because it's over 5,000.
To which I say, no, you missed the net part.
Because so many people have lived because there's no traffic, etc.
They have to consider that because that was all part of the same decision.
The decision to close the economy...
We necessarily saved a whole bunch of lives.
It wasn't why we did it, but it's there.
So already, and I predicted, that no matter how clearly and how often I would say the 5k is net, that when we know what the real numbers are, idiots would come after me on the internet and say, Scott, you said 5,000 and it's really 20,000, so I guess you're wrong.
Better admit it in public. And if you can believe it, somebody is already doing it.
Already somebody contacted me on LinkedIn and said, Scott, you should already admit that you're wrong because it's over 5,000 and you didn't say net the first time you said it.
Why do people like that exist?
Now, it probably is true that I didn't say net the first time I said it.
But I did say it way before we knew how many people were going to die.
I said it when about a thousand had died so far.
And it should be obvious that it's net.
Because it shouldn't be anything else.
The only thing that matters is the net.
That's the whole point. We're trying to net save people.
That's all we're doing.
So of course it's the net.
I shouldn't have to say it.
But already, so I'm going to block everybody who does that.
So I want to give you a warning.
There will be people come in here who say, you signed 5,000, so you're wrong.
It goes against your appropriate record.
And I'm just going to block you for being stupid, okay?
So just know that that's going to happen.
All right. So we learned yesterday that the Florida emergency management officials said The 3M was selling masks to other countries because they were showing up with cash or they were ahead of us in the line.
Then some people are saying, well, you have to let people sell across borders because if everybody did that, then we might have less supply because we wouldn't be able to get it from other countries.
I don't know if any of that's true.
But let me say this.
I don't judge this kind of mistake, and that has to be judged as a mistake by the government.
I don't judge this as a mistake because as soon as they found out about it, they stopped it.
So this is a case of things working correctly.
Now, you would like that we would have anticipated this from day one, that somebody should have said on day one, here's the law, you know, under the Emergency Act or whatever act or executive order, whatever we need to do, you can't sell it to foreign countries because we need it here.
But I don't know if anybody thought of that, did they?
I don't believe anybody had it on the top of their mind that that was even a risk.
It was a hole that needed to be plugged.
But apparently as soon as the President heard about it, within 60 seconds, he said, go plug that hole, and then they did.
So I think this is exactly the kind of mistake that you should judge generously.
Because we're in an emergency, it's fog of war, we're probably going to make all kinds of mistakes, but if we're correcting them as soon as we make them, that's really as good as you can do.
So I'm not going to criticize the president or the task force for that.
Whereas the not giving us good numbers about the PPE and ventilators, they've had plenty of time.
I'm definitely criticizing them for that.
How do you make decisions when you have incomplete data and you don't trust your data?
That's the situation we're in.
And I'll give you some hints.
One way is that you can make decisions you can reverse.
So if you don't know what you should do because the data is so fuzzy, do something that you can reverse if it doesn't work out.
So that's rule number one.
Next thing you want to do is things you can test, which is the same as reversing it if it doesn't work out.
You need to be able to know it's not working.
And then beyond that, you make decisions with the best expected value, which is you say, Well, there's a 10% chance of this happening and costing me $1,000, so I will value that at 10% times $1,000 or $100.
That's an expected value calculation.
You don't need to do all the math.
But there are ways to estimate things and there are ways to make decisions when all your data is bad.
One of the things you keep hearing from our experts is that our national strategy is to use data to make decisions.
But am I wrong that all of our data has been wrong so far?
I feel like all of our data is just bad.
So what does it mean to make data-based decisions when all of your data is bad and you know it?
Well, we're not really making data-based decisions.
We're not making decisions based on data.
That's sort of just something politicians say so you feel better about it.
They would make decisions based on data.
They want to.
They just don't have any.
They don't have the right kind of data that they can rely on.
So, I don't know what it means to make decisions on data when you don't have good data.
All right. But we can still make decisions.
Are you having the same head-shaking experience I am as you watch expert after expert get on television and give interviews, in which the experts are now saying, oh yeah, masks are a good idea.
Obviously. Oh, obviously.
Masks are a good idea.
And wasn't it just a few weeks ago that only the idiots who had no expertise were saying, obviously masks are a good idea.
Why are you lying to us like this?
And now the experts are acting like they knew it all along.
It's bugging me. It's kind of bugging me to watch the experts act as though it's just...
Common sense? Of course.
I mean, if the virus is spread by things coming out of your mouth, and especially some of them might be non-symptomatic, why wouldn't you want to cover that source of virus?
It's really bugging me, but I'm glad that they're coming around to the right answer.
And where were you a month ago is my question for those experts.
Let's see... I saw two people make the same suggestion today, and I would like to promote that idea.
Dana Perino and Jake Novak, who separately made the same kind of observation that we need some kind of a task force or somebody in charge of the go-back-to-work decision.
Because it's not just yes-no.
The decision to go back to work is probably going to get really complicated, and again, it'll be hard to have the right data But here's how I would do it.
So I agree with Dana Prito and Jake Novak, two of those smarter people who observe the world, just in general.
They're usually on the right side of stuff if you follow them.
But here are the factors that I think we should put into it.
So first of all, I would take this as a stake in the sand.
I would say, if you were going to send people back to work, we should not kid ourselves that it'll be 100% safe, because obviously it's not.
So we should set some kind of a level of risk that if you are below that risk, you can go back to work.
But if you're above that level of risk, maybe you wait a little while.
And here are the factors that I believe...
We could accurately say, determine your risk.
Now, of course, every person is individual, so you're not going to be able to protect every person.
Any guidelines you have will necessarily result in somebody who probably had a high risk but didn't know it, goes to work and ends up dead.
So don't think in terms of reducing risk to zero.
And I think if we were to reduce the risk Of going back to work to, let's say, normal flu season levels, whatever that is, then we'd probably be okay with at least the part of the world that would only have normal flu level risk.
We'd probably let them go back to work.
And here are the factors that would determine whether they have regular flu risk or extra coronavirus risk.
I've heard estimates that 80 to 90% of the hospitalized people are overweight.
Could we, in this country, say, here's the deal.
If your BMI is above this number, you're not safe.
Now, body mass index is, of course, dicey because muscular people look fat if you weigh them because muscle weighs more.
But I think we could work through some of that.
So here's the first thing.
It's politically incorrect to say fat people stay home.
We're in an emergency.
This is an emergency.
All the rules about polite behavior are out the window.
So let me say this as directly as I can.
When some people get to go back to work, fat people got to stay home because you don't have the same risk.
I'm sorry. Fat people have to stay home.
Now, I'm not fat shaming.
I'm not giving you any advice.
I'm just saying the math suggests that we will have a national tragedy If fat people go to work.
Until the virus is done.
So I think we have to grow up a little bit.
I'm using a provocative word and I'm saying fat because that sounds insulting.
But I'm trying to make the point that the moment you're complaining about that, the political correctness of it, then you don't understand what an emergency is.
It's an emergency. If we have to tell fat people to stay home, okay, we can call it overweight.
We can put it in terms of BMI, so we're polite.
We're still civilized, so we can put it in polite terms.
That's fine. But if we're getting worked up about you can't tell fat people to stay home, we've got to get over that.
Because part of the answer is going to be fat people stay home.
I'm sorry, that is going to be the answer on day one of people going back to work.
Assuming that the data supports that, and I think it probably does.
The next factor would be whether you could isolate yourself at work.
Do you have outdoor work?
If it's outdoor work or if it's isolated work or you're in a cubical environment and only one out of five of you are going back to work because the rest of you can telecommute, can you check the box that says, yeah, I can easily stay more than six feet away from people?
Could you have a factor for your age?
Of course, age is a big factor.
So if you're younger, you get to go back first.
How about if you're already recovered?
Soon, we hope, we'll have enough tests to know if somebody has the antibodies.
So obviously, if you're already recovered, that's good.
How about having an app to track your contacts?
And you can't go back to it. These are just brainstorming ideas.
How about an app that uses your, let's say, your Bluetooth?
And I think you could do this.
You have to turn on your Bluetooth and your app.
And you have to have the app that lets you go back to work.
Again, just brainstorming here.
So in order to get the go-ahead to go back to work, if you meet these other criteria, you also have to have your app on.
Wi-Fi has to be on.
And the only reason is it identifies people you're near.
So if it turns out later you get it, the government can just open up the app, They can see all the times that your Bluetooth was close enough to somebody else's Bluetooth, sends them a text message that says you are within six feet of somebody who is infected, maybe you should isolate, or whatever the recommendation is.
What about testing people for these ACE2 receptors in their lungs?
There's strong evidence that that makes a difference.
Let's say if you've had that test, that's another factor.
Another factor would be whether you could isolate at home, not just at work.
So in order to be allowed to go to work and then come back into your house, you're going to have to demonstrate that there's no old person in your house who can't be isolated.
So you'd have to have some criteria because you're also bringing the risk back into your house.
So that could be a factor.
Could we take all the old people who live with young people and put those old people in hotels for a few months?
Because there's a whole bunch of hotels that are available, right?
Could you say, yes, this household needs their breadwinner, let's say, to go to work, or breadwinners, but you can't allow it if grandma's still in the house and there's just too many people in the house.
So maybe grandma goes to stay at the Fairmont because there are no regular guests there anyway, and she just gets a better isolation situation.
So maybe that's a possibility.
How about you have to report every day, could be also on the same app I was talking about, whether today you have your sense of smell and taste.
Because apparently the Google searches for losing my sense of smell Go through the roof in places where there are hot spots, because that seems to be a risk.
You lose your sense of taste and smell.
And maybe take your temperature every day.
So maybe your requirement to go back to work is you have to have any one of the reliable testing devices.
Maybe it's queued into your app so it feeds it in automatically.
I don't know if that's necessary, or maybe you enter it.
But you have to enter your actual temperature every day.
Would anybody lie about that?
You know, maybe they've got a little fever or they didn't check it today.
Would they lie about it and say, no, I need to go to work, so I'm not going to say I have a little fever?
They might. But remember, this is not a 100% safety situation.
This is reducing the risk to maybe normal flu levels.
So, here is my second suggestion.
As we've watched the performance of the task force, do you have confidence that the task force in its current I don't think the task force is qualified to do this.
Because what we've seen so far does not suggest the level of competence that would be required to do the calculation of when to go back to work.
Am I wrong about that?
Has the task force shown the minimum level of competence to calculate what I said needs to be complemented?
I don't think so.
I don't even think close.
Because remember, they were wrong on masks.
They still can't tell us how much PPE we need.
I mean, these are pretty basic things.
So I would say that the task force, it's unlikely that they'll ever have the capability to do this as well as they should be done.
So, what do you do?
I think the public has to do it.
Now, that means that lots of people are trying it, and maybe somebody does it well, and that one wins.
But I think the public is going to have to come up with a checklist.
Maybe it's somebody building a website that lets you do it, or an app.
The website's faster. Maybe it's just somebody publishes an article that says, this is the way I would do it.
But I don't think it would be a good idea.
In fact, it would be a terrible idea.
To just assume that the task force will come up with an idea as good as the one I just described, or better.
I don't think you can count on that.
Because nothing they've done so far suggests that level of competence.
Somebody says Mark Cuban and you should run this.
Well, we both got a lot going on, but...
Yeah, Mark Cuban is really...
Really stepped up, so I could not say enough good things about his level of patriotic leadership that he's showing here.
So that's my suggestion, is that we, the public, if you think you could take a stab at this, even if it needed to be refined, take a stab at it, because I think the government needs your help.
And I'll even go further and suggest, what would you call this, What is it you call it when you don't comply with the government?
There's a word for that, some kind of protest.
But we could easily get to the point where the people decide to go back to work before the government says yes.
We could easily decide as a public that we're just going to go back to work and overwhelm the system.
So, for example, if one person decides to go back to work against the recommendations, the police go and they say, you can't do that, and they stop it.
But if everybody went back to work, it wouldn't be possible to enforce it, right?
Or if some large number went back to work, it would just be more than the system could police.
And we might get to that point.
But I would say that we should not get to that point unless we, the public, have come up with some kind of general consensus checklist that says, look, I'm not going to wait for the government to approve me.
I'm going to do my own checklist.
At least I did the work.
I thought it through.
I calculated the odds.
But here's my checklist, government.
It would have been good if you gave me this.
But if you're not going to give me the checklist, I'm going to give it to you.
So I'm going back to work.
Sue me. Throw me in jail.
Here's why I did it. Good luck.
Take that to a jury. Arrest me.
Give me a jury trial, and I'm going to show the jury what I did, and why I went back to work, and why that risk was reasonable based on these calculations.
And then I'm going to tell the jury that the government should have done that for me, but didn't.
Put me in jail. Civil disobedience, yes.
So the phrase is civil disobedience.
So I think that we should be prepared for civil disobedience.
But civil disobedience is keyword civil, right?
I'm not talking about riots.
I'm talking about intelligent civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience done right is really filling in for what the government should have already done for you.
I mean, that's why it's civil, right?
It's civil because the government really just should have done it.
And you're embarrassing them into it, basically.
So I think that we could reach a point where if our government has not given us the checklist of what it takes to go back to work, we should make our own and then go back to work.
Civil disobedience.
Now, I'm not saying when we should do that.
We definitely shouldn't do it until smart people are really happy that we have a checklist that makes sense.
Now, probably the minimum you need to wait for is to have tests available.
So I wouldn't do any civil disobedience while you don't have the right tools.
But as soon as we get those tools, the ability to, say, test at home rapidly, Maybe the ability to test our genetics as well.
As soon as we have those tools, I don't think the government can keep us home forever.
You feel me?
There might be a point where we just have to overrule our government on this.
But only intelligently.
Only intelligently.
Because then it makes sense.
Here are some things, if you want to further reduce your confidence in your government and the news...
I want to remind you again the things you heard from me before you heard them from the regular news.
Now, I'm not saying that I alone was the first or even close to the first to mention any of these topics.
So I'm not saying I started these or I was first.
I'm saying that you probably heard them first from me.
And what does that tell you about the The internet and its information base versus the so-called legitimate news.
So here are things you heard first from me.
I didn't make any of these up.
I heard them from other people.
But the hydrochloroquine, the masks, that that might have some potential.
We don't know yet. You heard from me that the convalescent blood treatment might have a lot of potential.
And now that's the big talk.
Again, these didn't come from me.
You know, that one came from Ian.
They all came from some other source.
I said that masks work.
Where was the first place you heard that maybe we could retrofit the CPAP? And there's a thing called a BiPAP.
Where did you hear that maybe we could retrofit them and turn them into ventilators?
Well, it's happening. Who's the first person who told you maybe you could split a ventilator and have two people on it?
Probably me, right?
Now that's in the news. Who's the first person who told you there was probably a genetic component?
You probably heard that somewhere else.
But there's still not much chatter about it.
I tweeted an article about it, so there is now some reporting on that.
The ACE2 thing seems to matter.
And who was the first to tell you that you didn't know it yet, but there would be fast advances in blood testing because that technology existed.
It just hadn't worked its way at the mainstream yet.
And now you've seen it.
A bunch of companies just popped up, and suddenly they've got little devices, which is what I told you.
It would be tabletop devices that could do advanced blood tests really easily.
And this is because after 9-11, the government labs built that technology, and then they licensed it I'd seen the startups a few years ago.
So I knew that this technology was just ready to be implemented.
And sure enough, within a few weeks, they were already building lots of machines that could do that sort of stuff.
We're starting to have the conversation about whether economists or epidemiologists should make the decision about going back to work.
It's exactly the right question.
And it highlights the talent stack problem, which is if somebody's just an economist, do you want them making the decision of when we go back to work?
Or if somebody's just a doctor, no matter how qualified, do you want them to make the decision?
Because you really need somebody who can see the whole field, right?
And That's going to be tough.
So the problem is that the doctors are going to want to reduce deaths to zero, and they're not really going to be focused on the economics of it, even though they understand that bad economics could lead to death, too.
So it's the nature of the job that they're probably going to focus on near-term deaths.
Whereas the economists might say, well...
People are going to die no matter what, so what's our best overall situation?
So keep an eye on that, and make sure that people with the right talent stacks are making the suggestions.
All right.
Today's death rate is lower than yesterday's, or are you saying that yesterday's was lower than the day before?
Which we know to be true.
So I still don't know about today, and it's too early to know about today, right?
The day just started.
Testing is our way out.
Yes, of course it is. So testing is our way out.
So tell me, how long will it be before you can test yourself at home?
No idea, right? You have no idea.
That's the failure of the task force.
If the task force can't give you even a range of when you might be able to test yourself at home, even if you don't have symptoms, to find out if you have antibodies, if they can't even give you a range, that's not competent.
So I'll say it as many times as I need to.
The task force is not achieving the minimum level of competence.
Because if they did, they'd have estimates for things, even if they're wrong, even if they have to change them, even if they have to update them every 10 minutes.
No estimates, no competence.
It's as simple as that. So, you know, if you had to guess, will you have a way to test yourself easily at home for antibodies in a month?
You have no idea. Two months?
You have no idea.
Three months? No idea.
That's completely unacceptable.
Completely. Because the task force, for example, knows which companies have committed to be able to make test kits.
Those companies surely have given them estimates of how much they can produce.
So if you know who's producing it and how much they can produce, and you know how many people are going to need it, tell us.
Tell us. That's the minimum level of competence.
Gosh, people, we can make a million a week, but until we can make 20 million a week, we're not going to be on top of this.
Whatever the number is.
So, tell us.
Tell us. Yeah, in an unrelated story, the FBI apparently lied or did not follow the rules on every single FISA application.
I'm not even following that story, because all of our attention has been diverted.
But just think about the fact that the World Health Organization lied about everything.
Our experts lied about masks.
They lied about supplies of things.
The early numbers don't seem to match what we're already experiencing from the models.
So all the credibility of those types of experts, right out the window.
At the same time, our FBI, who we used to think was credible, we find out has been massively...
What would you call it? I don't know if it's illegal or it's just bad behavior.
So, I'll tell you, I've never had less trust for the professional class.
At the same time, we don't really have a choice.
So, I will trust my doctor most of the time.
And I will go to a hospital if I need it.
So, I'm still going to use the experts...
And if they can produce numbers, I'm probably still going to act based on those, even if they're wrong and they need to update them.
All right. Imperfect.
I must have estimates.
We don't all need tests.
Well, we probably don't all need tests, but we probably do need to do enough tests.
And wouldn't you like to know if you have the antibodies?
So people like me, who experienced some kind of really bad illness in January that I didn't have a name for, I'd like to know.
I'd like to know if I already had it, because I'd be leaving the house a lot more if I had.
So, yeah, I want to test to know if I have antibodies.
Every prediction they make that fails by one hour will still be used as an attack.
Yeah, that's too bad.
They should do it anyway. Radio Free Tom is hardest hit.
I don't know what that means. We need incentives.
Incentives for what? Somebody says, I don't think they're lying, they just don't know about the availability of equipment.
It's a little of both.
But not knowing the exact number should not stop you from estimating.
You still can do it. Alright.
That's all I've got for now, and I'll talk to you tonight, 10pm Eastern, 7pm Pacific.
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