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April 6, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:00
Episode 896 Scott Adams: My #Coronavirus Ventriloquist Act is Not to be Missed

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Coronavirus task force incentives are wrong Surge preparation and empty hospitals PPE supply chain issues and price gouging Some #Loserthink takes on coronavirus --- 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 the simultaneous sip.
It's good to see Bill Pulte in the house.
Bill, are you wearing your mask?
Be careful. Can't be too careful.
Well, today the Simultaneous Sip will be extra special because it always is.
Let's face it. And all you need to participate in the Simultaneous Sip is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask of salami kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the...
Oh, okay.
Well, this isn't going to be so easy.
If you're listening at home, I'm wearing a face mask.
Something's got to give. I can either risk my life or not have coffee.
Risk my life, not have coffee.
Sip time!
Go! Oh, yeah.
You've got to keep your priorities straight, people.
Now, back to safety.
Now, you might be saying to yourself, Scott, why are you selfishly wearing an N95 mask when everybody knows that they should be reserved for medical professionals?
Well, the story is, I found this in a drawer.
I don't know how old it is.
I don't know why I originally ever had it.
But I sort of randomly found it in a drawer, and it had been used, so I don't think that the medical professionals wanted this one.
Now, I'm always looking for the bright spot in the crisis.
And I think there's one bright spot that everybody is overlooking, and I feel it's down to me to point out the positive in this bad situation.
And the positive is...
Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be a ventriloquist.
But if you've ever tried being a ventriloquist, it's really hard until today.
So I'd like to do my ventriloquist act.
I'm asking Dilbert to join me.
Dilbert has his face mask on.
And I give you now ventriloquism in the age of coronavirus.
Hey Dilbert, how you doing today?
I'm doing pretty good. Pretty good.
Are you worried about the coronavirus?
A little bit. Yeah, a little bit.
Doing my social isolation.
How's that working out?
It's the social isolation that is.
Well, seriously, when you're a single guy, every day is Palm Sunday.
What? Every day is Palm Sunday.
I don't get it.
That's okay. Well, so Dilbert, do you have a sense of smell?
No. Do you have a sense of taste?
No. Did they recently go away?
Now that you mention it, yeah.
Sort of recent. Do you feel any fever?
A little bit. A little bit warm.
Gotta admit. I don't know.
Is it warm in here? Is it warm in here?
I can't... It seems a little warm in here.
Do you have any chest pains or a dry cough?
Yeah, now that you mention it, a little bit of a dry cough and my chest pains.
Oh, my chest pains.
Yep, yep, chest pains.
A little bit, yeah, now that you mention it.
Well, I'm no doctor.
But you're a little bit close to me right now.
Really? Really?
Yeah, you're really close to me right now.
Really? Really?
Is this close? I'm not touching you.
I'm not touching you.
No, this isn't funny.
I'm not touching you.
This is not funny.
I know you think this is funny.
This is not funny.
I'm not touching you.
That's how you handle that.
So, in the age of coronavirus, we all can be ventriloquists.
It's much easier. Alright.
Did you hear the news that Joe Biden has agreed that If he appears in public, he'll wear a mask, a face mask.
Now, I love my simulation.
And the simulation every day delivers to us a little delicious nugget.
What is the one thing that you didn't necessarily think was true, but you couldn't get it out of your head, that Joe Biden, when he's only appearing from his secret basement bunker on video, he could be a deep fake.
I'm not saying he is.
But you can't rule it out because the technology could actually reproduce that.
But luckily we'll see him in person, except that he'll be wearing a mask and probably his aviator sunglasses.
So what could be more perfect than a candidate for president who is unable to show proof of life I think that's just perfect.
An insightful comment from Twitter user A.S. Fooley.
P-H-O-U-L-E. And he says this.
He says, the task force has no incentive to give an all clear.
In other words, to tell us we can go back to work.
They have the same problem the FDA has when approving new drugs.
And that they'll get criticized if someone ties their decision to a death.
Any death. Trade-offs go out the window.
You are correct. You are correct.
Even though your name sounds like fool, that's a very wise thing to say.
I'm probably pronouncing it wrong.
And I would agree that the incentives are wrong because the leaders, their primary incentive is to avoid killing somebody.
Whereas you and I, if we were to make the decision, we'd say, well, maybe it's better to get the economy running and a few people could die.
It's a tough world.
You've got to make choices. So I don't think that our leaders are in a position to make the decision that is the most important decision.
In other words, we have a system which handcuffs the decision makers and they really can't make an independent decision that would be good for the country because what's good for the country could be the very opposite of what's good for the decision makers.
So that's a bad system.
A good system is where, let's say, there's transparency and democracy, and everybody can see what the leader is doing.
Then you say, oh, okay.
Well, that decision, it might be good for the leader too, but it's so transparent, we can see that it's also good for us.
So as long as the leader's interests and our interests are the same, it doesn't matter too much if a decision is also good for the leader, as long as it's good for us too.
You know, if something's good for the economy, it would be good for the Trump business.
But I don't rule it out because of that.
I just say, well, isn't it good that we have the same incentives?
But as was just pointed out, we, the public, do not have the same incentives as our leader at this moment, and that could kill a lot of people.
It actually could kill people, that system imbalance.
So what would it take?
To fix the system so that the people who are making the decisions could make a decision that would get people killed and still would be okay with the decision makers.
Who possibly could make those kinds of decisions?
Somebody says AI. I hadn't thought about that, but that would be an interesting alternative if we had that technology.
Here's my answer.
The public.
We have a situation in which we cannot depend on our leaders to make the right decision, because what's good for them is actually not what's good for us.
Because they're more about not being blamed for killing somebody.
Totally understandable.
Humans are humans, right?
If you were in that position, you'd be a little reluctant to kill people and have that on your permanent record.
But if the economy takes a big hit, well, you're a famous doctor or you're the president.
You're not personally going to take much of a hit.
Your life will be similar, but you don't want to be blamed for murder.
I'm sorry.
So the one way to solve this that I can see is for the public to take control of the decision.
Not yet. I think you still have to give them a little bit of room to operate.
There's still information being collected, etc.
But my personal timeline goes like this.
If at the end of this week...
Our leaders are not doing the minimum level of competent behavior, which is they have something like a plan.
I don't care if it gets revised, but there should be something like an initial plan.
And something like telling us how many supplies we have for the hospitals and how many we need.
Just really basic stuff.
If they can do that by the end of the week, and it's pretty easy...
There's nothing difficult about any of that.
Then I would say, okay, let the government keep running with the ball because they've shown they can get yardage, to use a sports analogy.
And so as long as they're gaining ground, let them keep going.
But if it looks like at the end of this week we don't have something that looks like a plan, even a preliminary one, And we don't have something that looks like good information so that we, the public, can make some decisions on our own or participate or show our support for something or put more money behind pushing to get more supplies of this kind or that,
knowing how big the risk is so we can buy into the government's decision or not buy into it because we've been fully informed.
So, if we get to the end of the week, we just have to take matters into our own hands.
Has that ever worked before?
Have you ever seen a situation recently in which the public made the decision and then just forced the government to do it?
Yeah. Yeah, you saw it this week.
Who forced the government and our experts to finally admit that face masks work?
That didn't come from the government.
That didn't come from the experts.
That came from us.
That came from the public.
The public basically just overruled the experts.
Right? That's what I saw.
I saw the public say, it's obvious that you're lying to us about that, so you're going to change that now.
You're going to go change that.
And what did the public do?
Or what did the leaders do?
They went and changed it.
They went and changed it because their bosses, the public, said, you know, we're okay giving you a lot of freedom to be flexible because we don't have all the information.
But when you lie to us that aggressively and that blatantly about the face masks not working, you don't get to make the decisions anymore.
The public took that decision away from them.
Am I over-interpreting that?
Would you say that that was an accurate description of what we just witnessed?
Did you not witness the public simply took the decision away from the leaders and the experts because it was obvious they weren't getting it done?
It was obvious they were lying to us.
Well, likewise, although maybe we don't know the right answers for when to go back to work and how to do it, we do know the difference between having a plan and not having a plan.
We can tell the difference.
And we don't have a plan.
And if we don't get one, I think we have to take that control back.
So we, the public, need to do exactly what we did with face masks.
We need to take the decision-making back if we have a system where the incentives of our leaders and our experts render them unable to act, or at least unable to act in a way that we think is in the best interest for the public.
So at the end of the week...
If we don't have something that looks like the government actually being able to function in a good way that's good for the public, then I'm going to start putting together a plan.
And if I can get enough public support for it, I think we should exert civil disobedience and just implement the plan.
Now here's the thing you need to know.
If three people break the law, well, they go to jail.
You know, because there's lots of police, and if only three people are breaking the law and they get caught, well, they go to jail.
But if 100 billion people break the law or break the guidelines, in this case it's more of guidelines than laws, if 100 billion people break the guidelines, the police break them too.
And they say, oh, I guess we're doing this now.
The police don't send 100 million people home.
They can't. So, We should watch our government and we should have very clear criteria for what it means for them to succeed and to fail.
And here's my clear criteria.
At the end of the week, we should have something like the bare bones of a plan to get back to work.
At least an outline, the beginning of, something that shows there's thought An intention there that seems in the right direction.
Doesn't have to be perfect.
Doesn't even have to be one that I personally agree with, because I'm no expert.
But something that shows they're doing the job.
That would be enough. And also something that shows they're at least trying to give us useful numbers about the PPE and ventilators and all that stuff.
So those are very objective.
They either gave us some context of how much we have and how much we need, or they didn't.
It doesn't even have to be accurate because they can update it as they go.
So that's where I'm at.
It seems to me that CNN is in a bad spot because they need this hydroxychloroquine to not work.
Because a lot of what they need to believe and they need for their business model and they need for the public to find out is that the president is not serving them well.
He's being unscientific about his optimism.
And it's starting to bug me.
Because here's what I'm watching the press doing, and I don't know if the press could be more worthless than this.
It feels like the press is trying to get Fauci and Trump to act like the other.
In other words, they're trying to get Trump to talk the way a doctor would talk, and they're trying to get Fauci to talk the way a non-doctor would talk, About exactly the same topic, you know, whether it's worth the risk of the hydroxychloroquine.
But they don't disagree.
It's only the way they talk that's different.
I don't need Trump to talk like a doctor.
I don't need the doctor to talk like a layperson.
I'm perfectly happy if the doctor says, this is not going through clinical trials, that's what would tell us that it's the safest.
That's what would be required for me personally as a doctor to say, go do this.
But as a doctor, I can also say that individual doctors might make the choice and it might be a reasonable one to give the drug under certain circumstances.
What does President Trump say?
Same thing. President Trump says the same thing.
He just uses layperson language.
So if I have to sit through another press conference Where the press is trying to get Trump to talk like a doctor or trying to get a doctor to talk like Trump, could anything be less useful than that?
Anything. Is there anything that the press could do to make themselves more discredited, more useless, Than trying to get two different professions to use the same language, even when we know they're talking about exactly the same thing in the same way.
I mean, content-wise, it's the same thing.
Could not be more useless.
Apparently, if you watched the last conference Trump referred to, or maybe it was the one before, he referred to a study that said that people who were We're not getting COVID-19.
And the suggestion is that that shows that the drug works to prevent coronavirus.
The problem with that is that that never happened.
There is no study of that type.
There is anecdotal evidence from China, I think, that they said that they noticed that correlation.
So it's something they noticed, but it's not a study.
So the president was just dead wrong that it's a study, because that would certainly inflate the credibility of what we do have, which is just anecdotal reports that China noticed there was a correlation.
Here's an update from my local medical situation in Northern California, at least for Kaiser Permanente.
I can't speak for other hospitals.
If you have all of the symptoms for coronavirus, I mean, just the classic ones, it's just obvious you have it.
You know, the shorter breath, the tightness, the dry cough, you know, that you've had for several weeks, contact with people who might...
Yeah, everything. If you have all of the symptoms...
But you're not hospital ready.
You can't get a test.
You can't get a test.
And you can't get the hydroxychloroquine or anything else.
You're literally told to walk it off.
So the medical profession where I live is already non-existent.
I can't go there for something else because they're sort of reserving the hospitals for the important stuff.
So I can't use it for what I want to use it for, nor can I use it for the thing it's designed for, which is coronavirus.
So you can't use it if you don't have coronavirus, but you also can't use it if you have coronavirus.
Those are the two conditions.
Now, if you have coronavirus and you're ready for hospitalization...
Then apparently they'll start to get flexible when it's too late.
Because the hydroxychloroquine almost certainly has more impact if you get it early.
And at the same time, I can confirm from one person in my personal circle who is a hospital employee who was sent home because they don't have anything to do.
Now, is there any conflict...
Between the predictions that the hospitals will be slammed and the fact that 90% of the hospitals or something like that are so not busy they're sending people home because there's nothing to do.
There's no conflict between those two things.
The reason 90% of the hospitals are empty is because they're anticipating a surge.
And the anticipated surge is not today.
At least not today everywhere.
It's like a week from now.
So the fact that they're ready And maybe they got ready too soon.
I don't think that's a knock against them.
And it certainly doesn't say that they're doing anything wrong just based on that.
So here's the two movies that have taken form.
And this is going to bug you for years.
But there are two movies, or two interpretations of what we're seeing, and they can never be sorted out.
Meaning that there's no way in the future we'll ever know who was right.
So these two movies will just go forever.
The two movies are this.
Movie one, infections are lower than predicted because the mitigation works.
So we're seeing less than predicted deaths and infections exactly because social isolation works.
And maybe also the hydroxychloroquine is working for the few people who can get it.
So that would be movie one, that we're doing all the right things, and it's working.
Here's movie two.
Infections are lower than predicted, and that's proof that the entire thing was a giant hoax, and we should have gone to work the whole time.
You'll never be able to sort those out.
A hundred years from now, we still won't know if infections were low because we did a good job, and there will be people who argue it and they'll have statistics and arguments, Or if it was never that big a problem in the first place, and we just had a mass hysteria about it, because you know there are going to be experts and scientists and data to make that point as well.
Those two worlds will go forward forever and never have to bump.
They're just two completely different realities that have now been created, and you've got to pick one.
You're going to live in one of those realities or the other.
So that's not good.
If you didn't hear me last night, there's a website that I tweeted yesterday.
So if you look in my yesterday tweets, you'll see that you can calculate your own risk of dying from coronavirus.
And I calculated mine, put it in my particulars, and it gave me a 2.6% chance of dying if I get it.
And about a 50% chance of getting it.
So you'll cut that in half.
So, 1.3% chance of me dying of coronavirus, according to one website.
I mentioned last night, but if some of you didn't hear it, some smart people are noticing that there's this freakishly good correlation between what happens to people when they've got COVID-19 and what happens to people with a completely different problem called high-altitude pulmonary edema.
Now, the theory is that with high-altitude pulmonary edema, that it's not the lungs necessarily...
Well, yeah, I think the issue is that if you look at the lungs of the two different patients with these two different problems, and you do the checklist of symptoms, they're identical.
Now, the fact that the symptoms are identical doesn't mean that there's only one problem, and we should figure out which it is.
It means that these two have something in common that might be useful to know.
In other words, it might be a key to finding out something important.
And the hypothesis is that just maybe, unlike the current view, the consensus view, is that the virus gets in your lungs and destroys them, that what might be happening, unconfirmed, Some doctors are speculating that what might be happening is that the blood might get degraded so it can't carry the oxygen to the lungs.
And then the damage you see in the lungs is simply the result of the blood being damaged and not being able to provide enough oxygen.
And that would also suggest that there's a reason the hydroxychloroquine works because, I'm told, I can't verify this myself, but I'm told that malaria has that same quality, which is that it affects the blood.
So if the hydroxychloroquine is known to fix something in the blood, and this might also be a problem that's happening in the blood, and there are very similar protective mechanisms going on, there are some smart people who say, maybe that's the reason it's working.
So you got that going on.
So there are two completely different theories of what the problem is, whether the infection is hurting the lungs directly or the blood directly, and then the blood hurts the lungs.
But in both of those cases, the anecdotal evidence suggests that the hydroxychloroquine is still a good bet.
Two completely different potential explanations, and it's the same treatment.
And the treatment doesn't have a big downside in terms of side effects.
It's just getting painfully obvious that the supply of this drug is important.
Now, of course, the lupus people and the arthritis people and the malaria people are justifiably quite concerned That their supply will be taken away.
And they could die. If you've got untreated lupus or something, you could just die.
So they are justifiably panicked about their supply situation.
But, here again, since the task force does not give us useful information about how much we have and how much we need, and I've been asked this question, which is a fair question.
People say, does it really matter if the public...
Knows the data as long as we're trying as hard as we can to make as much as we can.
And I would say, under normal world, you could see why it wouldn't matter as long as we're trying as hard as we can to make as much as we can.
Well, that's all you can do.
And it's not a problem if you make too much.
That's not the worst problem in the world.
But here's the problem.
Let's take hydroxychloroquine.
Do you know, as a citizen, do you know if the reason that you can't get it...
Is because of supply, or because of incompetence in leadership, or specifically a specific kind of incompetence, which is the leaders don't want to risk of killing somebody, even if it means saving a million.
Can you tell, as a citizen, if the real problem here is the supply?
You can't, because our government has not given us supply information in context.
Today, for example, FEMA tweeted out this completely useless information.
This is from Pete Gaynor at FEMA. Now, this is nothing against Pete Gaynor, nothing against FEMA, but he tweets out, That the Project Airbridge, where we're flying in stuff from other countries, brought in 2.85 million surgical masks, 18,000 gallons, 170,000 respirators, 11 million gloves.
Is that a lot?
Do you know? Is that a lot?
A plane came in with 170,000 N95 respirators.
How many hospitals does that supply for how many days?
Is that three hospitals?
Does that give us 1% of our capacity?
There's no context.
Why do I care how much was on the plane?
I don't. I only care that we have enough.
I care that we have 10% or 90%.
So here's a concrete answer to your question.
Why does the public need to know?
Here's why I need to know.
If the reason I can't get the meds that I personally think would be a good risk-reward trade-off, you know, the hydroxychloroquine, if the reason I can't get it is because the supply can't be fixed, then I'm going to be patient.
And I'm going to say, okay, okay, let's let the lupus people get their supply.
Let's not do anything crazy until our supply is under control.
But I don't know that.
Our president just said we got 29 million pills.
Is that a lot?
Is that not a lot?
There's no context. I have no idea.
So I, as a citizen, can't get involved.
I can't push anybody.
I can't force anybody to resign.
I can't put pressure on anybody because I don't know what to pressure or why.
I'd just be flying blind.
But if you told me that we have enough pills...
And I'm still not getting them.
Let's say I had a reason to get them.
If we have enough and I'm not getting them, I know who to push.
Right? I'm going to push my government.
I'm going to push Fauci.
I'm going to, you know, rob a pharmacy.
I'm going to do something. But, so the long answer to the question is, in a situation where we can't trust our government to do the right thing because their incentives are wrong, Their incentive is to not kill anybody and have that on their resume.
Your incentive as a citizen is to do what's better for the greater good and for yourself, of course.
But you have a different incentive.
So you need the public to be able to be the boss and to push our leaders to do what they need to do, as we did with the face masks.
Now, with the face masks, we didn't need to be told too much extra information because it was just obvious that they were lying.
But with the hydroxychloroquine, it's not obvious to me what's a lie and what's just a genuine shortage and managing hoarding and all that stuff.
So without that information, we don't know how to be the boss.
And unfortunately, we have to be the boss.
Because the people who got the job of the boss can't do it.
Under these conditions, they can't operate.
They don't have the right incentive.
And I don't see that changing.
So you're going to have to take control.
Probably. Here's some good news.
This whole situation of trying to get these supplies is proving to us that competition and price transparency is probably the only thing that's ever going to fix healthcare.
So when you see all the price gouging and people just, you can't even find the supply.
They don't know who's lying.
It's three levels of distributors and middlemen.
If you're talking to the Bain company, they don't even know where their supply is because it went out to the distributors.
So you can see from just the PPE situation.
That the healthcare market is just a complete blind spot.
There's nobody from any vantage point who can look at it and say, oh, we've got this much of this, and it costs this much, and this person's selling at a little lower, maybe that can lower the price.
So there's no visibility, and this is being brought home to us with this emergency.
But the good news is, I think we can fix healthcare.
Because if you could go directly at this lack of transparency and market competition, I think there are gigantic gains to be made.
I don't think I realized how bad it was until the emergency sort of surfaced the inefficiencies there.
Here are some of the worst things that people are saying about coronavirus.
So here's the loser-thinkish, most loser-think things you can say.
So the three of them.
The three worst takes.
Now, I'm not saying I have all the right answers.
But there are some times that you can tell what is irrational.
So here are some of your rational points of view.
Our government is only pretending to be incompetent and not giving us good information because the real plan is the evil genius plan for softening us up for the coming dictatorship.
And that really this is all some kind of a dress rehearsal and sort of testing to see if they can make the public do anything they want just by lying to us or telling us to stay home.
Now, if your alternative explanations for what you observe are incredibly clever, farsighted genius plan, Or incompetence, which one's the likely one?
Because incompetence is basically universal.
Incredibly clever plan to take over the world that sees years in advance?
Eh, not so common.
Oh sure, I know a few people are working on it, but it's not very common.
So if you're going to bet on it, I wouldn't bet on that.
Here's another bad take.
That China intentionally released a weapon of mass destruction in the middle of one of their most populated centers as their way to weaken the United States.
How exactly did that meeting go?
Were the Chinese sitting around in their big leadership meeting and somebody said, I got an idea.
If you really want to hurt America, here's how you do it.
We'll create this awful virus, and then we'll release it in the middle of our population center in the middle of China.
And then one of the other leaders would say, can you connect the dots here?
Because I'm not seeing how releasing a weapon of mass destruction in the middle of our own territory gets us to that good place you're talking about.
Well, let me explain. We'll release it in Wuhan.
Yeah, sure, we might kill 300,000 people, but we'll keep it secret.
And it'll spread.
And then the United States will shut down its economy, but we won't because we don't care about our people and we're not reporting on the deaths anyway.
And then we'll keep growing while the United States destroys itself with their silliness.
Do you think that conversation happened?
I don't think so.
I think that as soon as someone in the meeting says, hey, I've got an idea, we'll release a weapon of mass destruction in our own territory, and we'll put it right in the middle.
We won't even put it at a port.
We'll put it right in the middle of the country.
A major scene.
As soon as somebody suggests that, that's kind of the end of you at the meeting, right?
Don't you say, thanks, Bob.
You can go now.
Here's the other bad take.
I think 90% of the hospitals are just so empty they're sending people home, and therefore that proves that it was all a hoax.
That's a really bad take.
Because the hospitals are empty in anticipation of an upcoming surge that isn't here yet.
Of course they're getting ready for the surge.
Of course they're empty the week before the surge, because they don't know exactly when it's going to start.
And they don't want to get a bunch of elective surgeries in the pipeline where you have to follow up and make sure the stitches are out and all that.
So if everything is working the way it should and people are getting ready for the surge, 90% of the hospitals should have no work.
That's if you're doing everything right.
This week they should all be empty getting ready.
Now if the surge doesn't come, well there's your two movies.
Because half of the country will say, well, it's because of our mitigation.
I guess we did a good job.
And half of the country will say, I told you it was a hoax.
No surge. All right.
Here are some things I've learned about why it's so hard to get masks.
So here are some things that I have some pretty good information on from a good source.
Who shall remain anonymous? So apparently what happened is that early on when smart people realized that masks were going to be in great demand, the smart people bought them all.
Now I'm talking about not just individuals, but I'm talking about distributors, you know, would put in a big order.
And then maybe some rich people also buying from the distributors and a bunch of foreign countries buying from them as well.
So if you're to look at the big makers of masks and say, hey, give us some face masks, the big manufacturer of face masks will say, we don't do that.
Because they don't. They make it.
And then they provide it to people who have placed orders, who are their distributors, and then the distributors who are in other countries, you know, we don't control them, then they apparently jack up the price to robbery levels that the United States will not pay.
So the basic problem is that the United States is saying, we'll pay this much, which is more than fair, it's above market, but we're not going to pay this much.
Guess what the price is?
It's not this much. It's this much.
Guess what other countries are willing to pay?
It's not this much.
It's this much.
And they're not even close.
They're not in the same ballpark.
The emergency pricing, the price-gouging price, is something like triple what the United States is willing to pay.
Now, you might say to yourself, well, we should just pay it.
Because the price of not paying it would be greater than the price of paying it.
Except, we're such a big country that if we pay the inflated price, what's going to happen?
Those of you with economics degrees, please fill in the blank.
If the United States doesn't hold firm at the lower price, and we go up to the market price, which is triple, what happens the day we do that?
Price goes up again. Because we would bid the price up.
We're a big enough buyer that we would change the market situation.
And then what happens to China?
Does China then say, well, I guess we can't buy any masks?
Nope. China comes in and says, damn it, I guess we've got to pay the quadruple price.
Then what does the United States do?
Say, well, we were only willing to pay triple, but we're not willing to pay quadruple?
No, because we don't get any masks.
So we have to go up to quadruple.
What happens the day you go up to quadruple?
It goes up to five times.
So you can't pay for it and get to a good result because paying for it, you know, paying the higher prices changes the market in a bad way.
And you can't not pay for it because then you don't get them.
So what are your options?
If you can't pay for it and you can't not pay for it, And those are your only options.
What do you do? Well, you do what you do now, which is you do the best you can.
You try pushing every button, every lever, every look under every rock.
You just do everything you can.
And that's sort of what's happening.
There's a whole... Mad Max, Road Warrior thing happening out there, I hear quite reliably.
So there are plenty of frauds in the market.
There are plenty of price gougers, people in different countries, shadowy people, lots of middlemen.
So there's absolutely no visibility in the mask market between the buyer and the supply.
The buyer can never talk to the supplier.
They have no conversation.
The only way that a buyer and a supplier can have a conversation is through several levels of middle people often in other countries who are not credible And they're not trying to make a good deal.
They're just criminals, basically.
So here's the situation.
You kind of can't get there from here in the short run.
So in the short run, unless you went in with weapons and actually just stole them, you actually couldn't get them.
I don't know the details of the...
There was some story about some masks were being delivered to Germany and the United States basically just stole them.
Well, if you hear that story out of context, you'd say to yourself, are you kidding me?
The United States just stole a shipment that was already bought and designated for another country that's our ally?
Did that really happen?
Well, I don't know if that really happened.
You know, these stories, you can't trust anything right now.
But I will tell you that that story describes the normal situation.
So let me tell you, it seems that if any country has a chance...
To steal masks?
They're going to do it. Because all the rules are gone.
It's just the Wild West out there.
So, yeah, so Mike Lindell is trying to make them in the United States, but what do you think he's going to charge for them?
Because the price to make them in the United States is not going to be anywhere near the price of making them overseas.
So Mike Lindell will probably create supply, and it will probably be dedicated to the United States, and that's great, but it's not going to be cheap.
But still, at least we can get it.
And if you buy it at his prices, he's probably not going to create an auction or a price war.
So Mike Lindell is probably at least part of the answer.
All right. What else we got going on here?
Just looking at my notes.
What would you say are the odds of hydroxychloroquine working?
I would love to see your comments.
I'll give you my estimate in a minute.
So, we're all aware of the hydroxychloroquine situation.
The situation is that there are no highly reliable studies of the type that would be the gold standard for studies.
There's only anecdotal and small studies that have problems.
If you were to put a percentage odds that the hydroxychloroquine works in a way that's substantial, it doesn't have to be like a miracle drug, but just say it works in a way that's substantial and really moves the ball, what percentage odds do you think that that's true?
Give me your odds in the comments, the odds that the hydroxychloroquine is a substantial and useful medicine for this.
Give it to me as a percentage.
So I'm going to read them off.
I see 65, 95, 1000, 100%, 80%, 80%, 80%, 75, high 70, 75.
This is really interesting because you can see that the answers are converging In that 75-80% range.
You've got some people who are willing to say 100%.
The people who are saying 100%, you should never talk in public again.
If you're estimating that the odds of the hydroxychloroquine working are 100%, you should never talk in public again.
Because it's not helping you.
Somebody says 99.8%.
I'll let you have that.
I'll let you have 99.8%.
But if you're saying 100%, you should never talk in public again.
I think that stopped.
Well, okay, there's another 100%.
Apparently I'm not influencing people or there's a time lag.
So I'm seeing a lot of 80%.
If I had to just sort of mentally do an average, just watching the numbers go by, it looks like it's somewhere in the high 70s or 80%.
Let me give you my estimate.
60%. So I'm on the low end compared to you.
So I go 60%.
And the reason that I'm lower than most of you is that I probably have spent more time looking at the unreliability of early studies.
Something like half of all studies that get peer-reviewed turn out not to be true.
They don't hold up in overtime.
So if you didn't know that, if you said to yourself, well, I think doctors are usually right, When they see clear patterns like this, they're usually right.
So I'm going to say it's 80% chance they're right.
I don't know that's true.
I think when you have this level of information, that the odds of hydroxychloroquine working in a significant way, and again without terrible side effects, I'd give it 60%.
Solid 60%.
Based on anecdote and You know, doctor opinion and all that.
But the odds of it not working at all?
Solid 40%, in my opinion.
Alright, so I see you have many different opinions on that.
Here's the other warning.
I was just reading about a test where somebody tested the hydroxychloroquine and it didn't seem to have that much of an effect.
But then you look at the details, and it seems that where it works, reportedly, but not in a clinically, statistically convincing way, where it's reported to work, they're pairing it with zinc.
So that seems to be the magic comparison.
So when you're seeing the studies that purport to study the hydroxychloroquine, make sure that they're also studying it in combination with the azithromycin or at least the zinc.
Because if you're not seeing them studied as a group, you probably aren't getting something useful.
So that's just a little warning there.
All right. That's our situation today.
It will help 60% or 60% chance it will work.
To clarify, I'm saying that in my opinion, based on what we see, there's a 60% chance the drug is effective, as opposed to who it would help individually.
I'm not talking about that.
I say there's a 60% chance that it would help most people.
So he says, I knew you'd say that.
You know me well.
You know me well.
Yeah, the fact that doctors are taking it doesn't mean it's 100%.
The fact that doctors are taking it would mean it could be a 30% chance of working.
20%. If you were taking a drug that didn't have much in the way of side effects, and it gave you, you know, if you thought, well, there's a 20% chance this could save my life, you'd still take it.
A lot of people would.
So the fact that doctors take it is not telling you the odds too much.
It just tells you they're greater than zero.
Oh, that's true. In the comments, somebody says, no one's complained about the audio cutting out in a long time.
Yeah, that's true.
It looks like the reliability of the audio on Periscope has improved.
Hydroxychloroquine transport zinc past the cell membrane.
That sounds like something I read.
Yeah, we haven't heard if Boris Johnson is taking the drug cocktail.
Do you think there's any chance that Boris Johnson is not taking the drug?
By the way, the fact that Boris Johnson...
Who was famous for saying, you know, go about your business, at least in the early days.
He was sort of, well, let's just tough it out.
And then he got it, and he got it so bad that he's hospitalized.
I don't know how you could get re-elected after that, do you?
I mean, I don't know much about Great Britain.
But do you think Boris Johnson could get re-elected?
After taking a strong stand against the danger of something that put him in the hospital, like a few weeks later, that looks so ridiculous, I just don't know how you could get re-elected after that happens.
But, hey, stranger things have happened.
Alright, that's all I've got for now, and I will talk to you tonight, 10pm Eastern, 7pm Pacific.
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