Coronavirus has struck the United States, and the government is trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? And why should we be worried about it?
00:01:22.280And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the coronavirus.
00:01:29.400I feel my immune response up to the challenge.
00:01:43.680I went for a really nice walk last night after dark.
00:01:48.400So the weather around here is, you know, we're in that season where it could be a good day or a bad day, 50-degree swings.
00:01:55.620And last night it was pretty chilly, but I put on my big coat and scarf and hat and went for a long walk.
00:02:03.940And it is a really interesting world out there because there are a lot of people taking long walks because there's not much else to do.
00:04:11.820And we'll be great when we're past it.
00:04:14.400But, yeah, let's take it seriously at the same time.
00:04:19.400Somebody said that Bill Mitchell has turned around and may be taking it seriously.
00:04:25.300Could it be because he can't leave his house?
00:04:27.100Because, you know, there's part of me that wonders if, no, I don't think this is the case, but part of me wonders if the nature of the restrictions are meant to get your attention as much as they're meant to separate you.
00:04:45.740Now, of course, the important thing is to separate you.
00:04:48.280That's, you know, that's the functional part of it.
00:04:50.840But I have to think it has this second benefit that I'm sure people thought of, which is people did not take this seriously until the government of the United States said, don't leave your house or the police are going to tap you on the shoulder, well, from six feet away.
00:05:08.380They'll have like a six-foot pole and they'll say, hey, hey, get back in your house.
00:05:24.480Now, some of you know that Elon said some things that sounded like he was minimizing it or comparing it to a regular flu or something, which a lot of people did early on and then talked themselves out of it as events proceeded.
00:05:43.620But it looked like from the last couple of tweets I saw from Elon, he was talking about a particular drug.
00:06:02.860And apparently we're seeing multiple reports, not yet scientifically valid in humans, but assumed to be valid because it's been tried enough now already.
00:06:15.480Then people are seeing pretty clear across the board's benefits.
00:06:20.180Now, this is for somebody who's already got it.
00:06:22.200And apparently it makes a big difference.
00:07:56.960And I think the thinking was that this new drug that's four times more effective is close enough in nature to the other one that we do know a lot about.
00:08:10.140Though it's probably not the biggest risk in the world to make this available, especially to people who seem to be getting helped by it.
00:08:19.380So we've got two things that look really promising.
00:08:21.700So I said to myself, well, I assume we're just cranking out lots of that stuff, right?
00:10:26.240What's that going to do to the world, the collective brain of the world?
00:10:30.400If I had to bet on it, it's going to be somewhere between where Fauci is sort of, you know, quite reasonably,
00:10:40.800telling us that best practices would put it maybe a year or 18 months out, and probably closer to 18 months.
00:10:47.700And the president made happy sounds like, well, it could be just several months,
00:10:52.740which would be, you know, record-breaking, mind-boggling, impossible, nobody knows how you could do it.
00:11:01.540I'm going to bet somewhere in the middle, you know, maybe a year.
00:11:07.340I mean, you know, if we get a vaccine in nine months, which I think all the experts would say would be impossible under normal circumstances,
00:11:17.320but if we get it in nine months, I'm not going to be surprised.
00:11:21.200Because the principle in play here is that all of human ingenuity is focused on it.
00:11:31.120Every opportunity to cut a corner will be used.
00:11:35.700So you're not betting on Trump so much as you're betting on the collective talents of the most talented people our country has ever produced.
00:12:03.760If somebody can find that out, and I'm not clever enough to dig down to know how a particular company manufactures a particular drug in which factory.
00:14:35.140So I guess the question is we're not going to have to worry, I don't think, about any legalities.
00:14:41.160So it really comes down to a technical question and then like a manufacturing question.
00:14:47.600How fast could we spin up a, or convert an existing plant to just crank this, presumably the stronger version, the hydroxychloroquine, and just start cranking that stuff out just in case?
00:15:03.380And do you think, do you think we already know enough to do that?
00:15:08.840In other words, do we know enough about the possibilities of the drug that even if we're 60% sure, you know, you pick your number, 80% sure that it makes a difference?
00:15:21.200I'm talking about the scientists, I'm not talking about the scientists, I'm not talking about me being sure, but the scientists.
00:15:25.580If they're somewhere in that 60% to 80% certain that this could be a useful drug, where is my news reporting on where this is happening?
00:15:38.200Because you know what would make me feel a lot better, is to read in the, you know, Breitbart or New York Times or whoever does this story, that here's the factory, and they're already converting, and, you know, by the end of the week they'll be cranking this out like crazy, and we don't care about this French company.
00:16:01.220It's like they don't exist. We're just going to make this, and we're going to give it out like crazy, just in case.
00:16:09.100And again, you might want to withhold it from the public, which wouldn't be a bad strategy.
00:16:15.500It wouldn't be a bad strategy to make sure that, you know, a normal, healthy person can't get it, so you want to limit it to the medical people who can prescribe it.
00:17:24.320It's basically like wearing the, what do you call it when you're at home detention and you've got the ankle bracelet that is digitally monitored?
00:17:35.520Well, in Hong Kong, it's basically an ankle bracelet that can tell where you are, but it goes on your wrist, and it works with an app on your phone.
00:17:45.400And apparently, Hong Kong is pretty serious about this stuff.
00:17:57.780We should at least be working on this.
00:17:59.700And I guess it tells you, you know, you walk around the perimeter inside your house, and then it can map your house, and it knows exactly if you've even walked out the door.
00:18:10.020And apparently, that level of government monitoring has made a big difference in Hong Kong.
00:18:18.120And I do think that this is an information problem.
00:18:22.680You know, we treat it as a health problem, because that's what happens if you don't have information.
00:18:35.620And then if you don't do that right, the information problem, then it's a health problem, which is what we're seeing.
00:18:43.480But thinking of it as an information problem tells you where to put resources for prevention, which is in the technology.
00:18:50.380Speaking of which, I guess some of the nation's doctors are calling out for a national database.
00:18:59.740I think it's different than what Google was making.
00:19:02.100Google was making a database for people to check their symptoms or something.
00:19:06.380I think that's what that was going to be about.
00:19:07.900Whereas the doctors are saying, we need a database where all the credentialed physicians who are working on this around the world can share their outcomes and what they tried that worked and what you might not know if you haven't seen it yet.
00:19:27.880And now, since there's a national call for it to be built, I assume a whole bunch of people are just going to go off and try to build one on their own.
00:19:38.780And at some point, somebody official is going to say, we'll take the good one.
00:19:43.440But I would imagine a whole bunch of people just sat down the minute they saw that and said, I could make that.
00:19:49.420Because it's basically just an information sharing website.
00:19:53.520Probably just you could take components that already exist.
00:19:56.200Just go to your GitHub, grab some code and slap it together.
00:20:02.300Because it just needs to be bare bones.
00:20:09.260And remember I was telling you that we're at the flat part of the curve of human intelligence.
00:20:17.900In other words, we've got all the smart people working on it.
00:20:21.200And then they're going to share information.
00:20:22.860And it's the point where they're all sharing information that gets you to the elbow.
00:20:28.380The part where the human capability goes from not very good to, okay, we got this.
00:20:34.880And it'll go almost straight up after that.
00:20:37.600So we're sort of approaching the, you know, or I think we're about halfway into the middle of the elbow.
00:20:42.300And I didn't realize that we were lacking this very basic bit of intelligence gathering, which is the ability for the doctors to efficiently share what they know.
00:20:54.100But that will be, if I had to guess, we'll probably have that by the end of the week, right?
00:20:59.000I mean, how hard could it be to build that, really?
00:21:01.000So by the end of the week, all of these individual spots of genius, and I'm just going to call it that.
00:22:41.360I don't believe that this is a case of, you know, one plus one is two.
00:22:47.480Once the geniuses are connected, you're going to get a sort of a logarithmic, you know, exponential kind of an increase in what we know that's useful.
00:22:58.920So, I say this a lot, and I've said it a few times, and you've seen it to be true in some big cases.
00:23:08.200We can't tell the difference between being close to, you know, everything going wrong,
00:23:16.320and being right on the edge of everything starting to go right.
00:23:20.700Now, the moment that this turns, and it will turn, there's going to be a point where the news says one day,
00:23:27.800hey, it looks like it's stopped getting worse.