The dopamine hit of the day: a CNN piece about women being paid 80 cents on the dollar for the same job as men. Also, a new ad for the coronavirus, and a CNN article about a lack of trust in both the government and President Trump.
00:33:18.580I still think Klobuchar would be the stronger choice for Joe Biden.
00:33:24.680And the reason is that Klobuchar doesn't seem to have any negatives except maybe some personal likability that, frankly, voters don't care about.
00:33:35.700People don't care too much if you're mean to your staff.
00:33:39.900And Joe Biden is so nice that Amy Klobuchar's one tiny little small weakness of, you know, she ate a salad with a comb or she was mean to somebody, it gets sort of erased because Biden's niceness will cancel that out.
00:33:59.740But I think Klobuchar strikes you as somebody who could take the job right away.
00:34:07.240Even if you didn't like anything about Amy Klobuchar's policies, would you agree with me that if the choice was Kamala or Klobuchar, let's say there was never any president, you just had to choose.
00:34:21.200Klobuchar or Kamala, let's say you dislike their policies equally.
00:34:27.000You just had to choose who's a solid sort of presidential quality.
00:34:32.600I think head to head is Klobuchar because she doesn't have negatives.
00:34:48.360She did better than Kamala did in the race.
00:34:51.020I don't think it's even close if you're looking at her just as an individual.
00:34:55.440But if you're looking at what balances the ticket, I've said cheekily before that you might need to add a person of color to the Democratic ticket so that white people will vote for them.
00:35:07.680Because all the guilty white Democrats are going to need a person of color on the ticket to feel good about it.
00:35:13.540But I've said before that black voters apparently are more flexible than white voters, apparently are willing to vote for their self-interest as they see it, and apparently are a little bit more flexible about who they vote for.
00:35:30.320CPAC, that big Republican convention, apparently there was an attendee with a coronavirus, and was it AIPAC that had one too, and somebody shook hands with somebody who shook hands with the president, and the president says he's not concerned at all.
00:35:56.140If the president of the United States, in the middle of this crisis, which they're telling us to be worried, no, they're not telling us to be worried.
00:36:13.540Because I think you want your president telling people not to panic, so long as they're also getting the message to prepare.
00:36:21.140And so long as they're also getting the message that there's a real thing out there that needs to be worried about.
00:36:27.720I'm a little bit mixed on the Trump performance so far.
00:36:32.480As I always say, you can't really tell if he's doing a good or bad job on the details of, you know, who's in charge and what decisions have been made and all that stuff.
00:36:42.000You can't really tell, because you don't know how somebody else would have done.
00:36:47.880But you can tell the communication, because that's the part you can observe directly.
00:36:54.600Does the president say things and go to, you know, create events and do things that make you feel comfortable and make you feel like the government's got this?
00:37:05.800I would say, as I said yesterday, I think Trump's personality and the set of tools he brings to the job are extraordinary, like we've never seen before.
00:37:17.760But that's different from saying it fits every occasion.
00:37:21.900You need the right president with the right tools for the right situation.
00:37:25.400You know, the war president is not the peace president.
00:41:32.880Maybe the AMA has something to do with it.
00:41:35.100But the point is, I, as a citizen, had a little bit of exposure to that problem.
00:41:41.340It's a gigantic lever in this crisis, you know, to free up more potential doctor advice, even remotely, could be a big variable.
00:41:53.480And I happen to know that it would take one executive order to wipe all that away just for the emergency.
00:42:01.600Now, you probably want to limit it and say something like, you know, it's just for coronavirus inquiries and assistance.
00:42:07.940And it's only, it's only for a limited time frame because you don't want to go through the whole trouble of changing the whole system in the proper way.
00:42:16.400Now, some people have said to me, can you do an executive order like that?
00:42:21.040Because you'd be, wouldn't you be overruling all the states?
00:42:42.080Would it be legal for the President of the United States to do an executive order saying doctors could temporarily, and for this situation only, practice across state borders?
00:42:55.240If, if, if you're saying to yourself, you know, Scott, it would be illegal for the, an executive order, you know, for, for that to be done by an executive order, it doesn't matter.
00:43:12.540If nobody's going to complain, and nobody's going to complain, I mean, nobody that matters.
00:43:18.240If nobody's going to complain, and it's literally one piece of paper, executive order, I order doctors to be able to practice, you know, across state lines.
00:44:05.740So, if you haven't, if you're not following Balaji Srinivasan, you should.
00:44:11.040You can find his, I retweet him a lot, especially during the coronavirus thing, because his insight and expertise in this is tremendous.
00:44:21.040And one of the things that he found is that there was a development recently in that a certain kind of UV called far UV, and I don't know the difference between regular UV and something called far UV, but there's a technical difference.
00:44:38.880And apparently, in a 2018 Columbia paper that Balaji was tweeting about, it can kill airborne viruses.
00:44:49.640So, you can actually shoot the virus out of the air with light, a special kind of light.
00:44:57.620Now, I saw an estimate that you could build them for $1,000 a piece.
00:45:02.000Doesn't it seem like we could get that price down pretty quickly?
00:45:04.520And frankly, a lot of people would pay $1,000 a piece to put one in, let's say, in a public space.
00:45:11.220Then I learned, and this made me a little angry, then I learned that China ordered basically all of the robots, probably, that look like a Roomba.
00:45:23.340It's a little robot that looks like a Roomba and has a big light on it that just drives around hospitals in China, shoots the UV light into the environment to kill the virus in the air.
00:45:37.480To which I said, exactly what you're thinking right now, what?
00:45:42.820When I told you that, and you heard that there are robots that already exist, using technology that I think we can check pretty easily, works.
00:45:55.860You shoot some UV into the air, and you either have the same amount of virus or you don't.
00:46:10.240As soon as you heard that, didn't you say, where's my robot?
00:46:16.240Where does the United States have any robots?
00:46:19.320Because they're not buying them from the United States.
00:46:21.260I think they bought them from some European company.
00:46:24.780But as Balaji quite accurately says, this is not the sort of thing you want to run through some kind of long FDA approval thing.
00:46:33.060Is it not fairly easy for scientists to tell whether a light killed a virus?
00:46:41.980I feel as though we could figure that out without, you know, all the double-blind experiments that you would normally do.
00:46:48.460It's like, virus, light, turn it on, dead, yes or no, try it again, try it in a couple different rooms, try it in a couple different settings.
00:46:56.820I mean, it's not one test, but as Balaji says, you could very quickly get to the point where you were confident enough that it was safe enough.
00:47:07.340I guess there's a safety issue, but it's not a big one.
00:47:10.680And why don't we just go gung-ho with this?
00:47:16.060Now, it could be that, you know, there are going to be a lot of false starts and things we try that don't work and A-B testing.
00:47:22.380But this would certainly be on my list of things to go hard at.
00:47:25.460Now, where did the knowledge of this come from?
00:47:29.060Did the U.S. government already know that there existed robots with far-UV light on them?
00:47:41.000You assume that the government knows everything, but that's not my experience.
00:47:45.360My guess is that people like Balaji, you know, doing the job of a patriot and a citizen, just jumping in to do what he can do, same as I am right now.
00:47:57.700He's jumping in and saying, did you know about this?
00:48:00.360By now, people in the government do know about it because he's widely followed.
00:48:05.400And now a new piece of information is available for a potential solution.
00:48:09.580So when you say, did the president do a good or bad job?
00:48:13.560I think you have to adjust that for the fact that it's 2020 and we don't need the president to tell us everything to do for a global threat that's this well-known.
00:48:31.320We don't need the president to tell us.
00:48:34.280Speaking of that, I like to tell you every day those things you can do to keep yourself healthier, keep your immune system high.
00:48:41.660This is especially important to me because I'm, like I said, I'm in the kill zone because I'm at that age where the virus will kill me, especially because I have the asthma background.
00:48:51.000And so I'm keeping myself healthy and looking for tips on how to do that.
00:48:56.200And, of course, you all know about the sanitizing and the hand washing and the – and I've added to that you should do some moderate exercise, get some sun every day, get some vitamin D.
00:49:07.120These things are all implicated in helping your immune system.
00:49:10.520But there was another study that was sent around today, and since this is a weekend especially, I'm going to try to say this in the most G-rated way I can.
00:49:37.140Apparently, if you're an adult who is enjoying, let's say, time with yourself, let's say your partner is unavailable for whatever reason, and you're enjoying time with yourself, if you know what I mean.
00:50:02.680And apparently, science is pretty clear that that improves your cortisol situation, which reduces your stress and improves your immune response.
00:50:13.580So it turns out that one of the best things you can do to protect yourself and, dare I say, the country, if not the world, because you're a patriot, you want to protect the country too.
00:50:51.420So, Elon Musk makes a little news on the coronavirus.
00:50:54.780And he says in a tweet, I think this was yesterday-ish, he said, coronavirus panic is dumb, which, of course, caused everybody to say, Elon Musk is very smart.
00:51:10.000Why is he saying the coronavirus panic is dumb?
00:51:14.460He's not saying the virus is a hoax or anything like that.
00:51:17.120He's just saying the panic part is dumb.
00:51:19.780Now, of course, he was asked to clarify what that means.
00:53:47.720He says, because there are so few test kits, true enough, those who die with respiratory symptoms are tested, but those with minor symptoms are not.
00:53:59.780And then he says the prevalence of the coronavirus and other colds in general is high.
00:54:03.860So his point is that if, if I could sort of summarize it my own way, that this virus won't be that different from other viruses.
00:54:48.380Now, for Elon Musk's comments to be accepted as the reasonable view, it would also be true that cruise ships would not be experiencing unusual levels of death.
00:57:42.860But as soon as I asked that question, people couldn't understand that you can't look at this one ship and say they're old, and it doesn't mean anything, unless it's a common experience with the other ships.
00:58:01.360Somebody else said, and this was a good comment, they pointed out, what about Italy?
00:58:06.860Because the death rate in Italy seems through the roof, but they also have old people in Italy.
00:58:13.020And I've heard that their ventilation isn't so good, and closed spaces, and there's a lot of touching, and maybe their health care system isn't as good, etc.
00:58:23.040So you can't really tell too much from Italy, but these are the right questions.
00:58:26.780But I think the cruise ship deaths and the nursing home deaths, if you have a nursing home in which several people die from the same virus, that only is meaningful if you've looked at all the other nursing homes who have had viruses.
00:58:44.460If it's common to have six people die in the same nursing home from the same problem, and it happens every flu season with the regular flu, then you'd say, oh, this is like that.