What's the worst thing you can do to prepare for a pandemic? Do you know the answer to that question, or do you have no idea what to do at all? In this episode of the podcast, I'll tell you what I think is going to happen, and how you can prepare for it.
00:00:53.660Yeah, this is a cheap operation, but the quality is in the sipping.
00:01:01.940Sure, it's low production quality. Bad sound. Terrible lighting. Sketchy video quality.
00:01:10.940But we have something that the other live streams do not have. You can watch MSNBC all night long. You won't get this. You can watch CNN for decades and not get this. It's called The Simultaneous Sip and All You Need.
00:01:26.980Here's a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
00:01:37.300And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the frickin' pandemic, better.
00:01:54.940So, one of the scariest things in the world is something called the unknown.
00:02:02.620The unknown can be really scary, especially if your enemy is invisible. You literally can't even see it. So, if you don't know where it's going and you can't see it, well, that's the scariest possibility in the world.
00:02:16.600So, I'm going to fix that. I'm going to call on my decades of business and life experience to tell you where this is all going.
00:02:28.900Are you ready? So, I'm going to describe what the next several weeks look like, and you get to see how close I am.
00:02:38.920And it looks like this. So, we've got this big fight, if you will, between the people who say it's way too extreme to close the economy, you know, make this as short as possible, send us back to work, people are going to die, but it's better than crashing the economy.
00:02:56.600I would say that's an adult decision or an adult opinion. Whether you agree with it, whether you disagree with it, I do respect it, because it demonstrates an understanding of the costs and an understanding of the benefits.
00:03:12.960They're hard to measure, so it could be wrong or it could be right, because we don't know how big either of those sides are, but it's an adult decision, because it understands both the costs and the potential benefits.
00:03:25.660So, I always appreciate anybody who can see the whole field, but that doesn't mean that tells us what to do.
00:03:31.920And then there are the others who say, close it down until this virus is really under control, and we don't know how long that could take.
00:03:41.200And you're hearing scary kind of numbers, like, you know, weeks, months, and we say to ourselves quite reasonably, ah, how could we survive that long with a crashed economy?
00:03:53.720So, let me tell you what's actually going to happen, and it won't be one of those two things.
00:04:01.400Greg Goffield always says, and I'm always nodding my head at home when he says it, about trapped in the prison of two ideas.
00:04:10.100And we've sort of accidentally done that.
00:04:12.980Aren't you thinking to yourself that there are two conditions?
00:09:03.360I think that the professionals are trying to strike a balance between panicking and people, you know, murdering people to get a supply of the drug, and being optimistic.
00:09:21.000This is not what the medical professionals are saying.
00:09:24.200My belief is that they're striking a balance and that they know this stuff is better than, better than they're letting on.
00:09:31.860Because all of the evidence so far is it's, it's a pretty good kill shot if you get it early enough and you're not at death's door.
00:09:39.000And even if you're at death's door, some of these are looking pretty strong.
00:09:42.840All right, so here's what's going to happen.
00:09:46.500We are going to learn that we can take the death rate for a normal, healthy, let's say, people under 60, people with no underlying conditions.
00:09:56.400I believe that within a week, we will be able to say with a fair degree of confidence that if you can get them the chloroquine and drugs when symptoms present,
00:10:07.420and you're under 60 and there's nothing else special going on with you health-wise, I believe we're going to drive that very close to zero.
00:10:16.480And we'll probably know that in a week, you know, based on, you know, other places in the world doing similar things, et cetera.
00:10:24.240So in a week, let's say we know that if you're healthy and under 60, you could get sick, you'll probably get sick, half of people will get sick, maybe more.
00:11:44.440Let's say you've got lots of meds, because I think you can make them quicker than you can make test kits.
00:11:53.420And, you know, it's easier to give a med than to give a test.
00:11:56.140So I think you're going to see pop-up tents in the vicinity of hospitals or maybe other places.
00:12:03.020You probably want to be close to a hospital, you know, sort of within walking distance of a hospital with your pop-up tent.
00:12:09.300But because somebody's going to walk in there with a worse case, and they should have gone to the emergency room, so you need to get them there quickly.
00:12:16.420So I think what you're going to see is, especially in California and in other places as the weather warms, it's going to be tent-worthy weather.
00:12:28.740And we're going to see pop-up tents with people who are just dispensing the meds to people who are not so sick that they really need to be in the intensive care.
00:12:38.420So the first thing, I think, is that our ability to deliver it to people who are not critically ill will be very high.
00:13:26.500Now, if you take the people over 60 out of the restaurant consumer business, you lose a lot of money because people over 60 are a big, big, big part of the restaurant business everywhere.
00:13:39.360But could you get them up to getting close to meeting the rent just by saying if your servers are 20-somethings and you limit your customers to under 60 and you spread out the tables, let's give it a try.
00:13:57.400Maybe not in New York City, but maybe in Toledo.
00:14:00.740So, in other words, if you're thinking it's a light switch, economy on, economy off, you're dead wrong.
00:15:35.940Well, Rachel Maddow, please explain the following observation.
00:15:40.500So, since our press has largely failed us, and I think you could say that.
00:15:45.400You know, I'm seeing some good reports.
00:15:49.480Joel Pollack is doing, you know, great stuff.
00:15:52.000You know, actual sort of sourcing stuff from real people in the real world instead of just talking to politicians and seeing what their dumb quotes are.
00:16:00.060So, most of the news has just resorted to listening to people and then telling you what they said.
00:16:06.380And it's only the people who volunteer to talk, politicians.
00:16:09.040But any real investigative stuff is woefully lacking.
00:16:26.040I have a direct, you know, a direct knowledge of this fact that I'm going to tell you.
00:16:31.640So, as of yesterday, actually just hours ago, last night, a patient who had all the symptoms, and I think by now has been confirmed, to have coronavirus.
00:16:45.680And it's somebody who knows exactly how they got it.
00:16:49.540In other words, it's now somebody who just suddenly had symptoms and said, well, I think I have it.
00:16:54.480It was somebody who had close contact with somebody who had it.
00:16:57.620They had all the symptoms, you know, just classic, the tight chest, you know, the dry cough, the whole thing.
00:19:04.040Imagine you go into a hospital and you say, there are three known studies that show that this drug is super effective and has basically nothing to worry about in terms of side effects.
00:19:15.640You go into the hospital and you say that.
00:19:17.800Can I get that drug because I'm coughing, I've got the coronavirus, I've got the COVID-19, I could be dead in a few days without this drug.
00:19:29.920Do you think the hospital is going to say, in this current situation, do you think the hospital is going to say, you know, I don't know, it doesn't look dire enough?
00:21:05.400It's not like what you accuse the president of doing.
00:21:09.560What you're accusing the president of doing is maybe something that's technically, in some, you know, word and legal way, you could define it as untrue.
00:21:19.260But in the real world, if you've got the coronavirus, Rachel Maddow, and you drive into your local emergency room, Rachel Maddow, they're going to give you the drug that you just told the world isn't approved and isn't effective.
00:21:38.940I just followed somebody with the frickin' coronavirus, you know, digitally anyway, all the way into the emergency room and then got a picture of the actual IV in the arm and asked what's in there.
00:21:52.140And at least some of the stuff that's in there was the chloroquine, but I think there was a cocktail in there.
00:21:56.680There's no doubt that the thing is approved in the real world sense.
00:22:02.380You go into your emergency room, you're going to get the frickin' drug.
00:22:10.640Rachel Maddow, this is one of the most destructive, it almost seems intentional, because, you know, I've said this before, whatever you think of Rachel Maddow's, you know, her performance, her act, her politics, anything else, the one thing you can't question is she's super smart, right?
00:22:33.400I mean, even to do this job, if you watch her for five minutes, you could hate everything she says and still come away thinking, well, you're really smart.
00:22:43.340That's the impression I always get, is like she's really good at her job.
00:23:16.200Are you telling me she doesn't know that anybody can get this drug because doctors are going to be kind of flexible in the emergency situation?
00:26:17.540Oh, and by the way, there is some early indication, far short of being confirmed, that it's actually pretty hard to get it from casual contact.
00:26:27.220So there's not a lot of evidence that people are getting it from, just say, you know, going to the store and shopping with somebody who has it.
00:26:36.320So, I'm not telling you that's safe, so let me be very careful.
00:26:41.380The virus apparently lives on surfaces for a long time.
00:26:45.820So in the laboratory and scientifically and logically, you can get it, just being in a place where somebody else has it.
00:26:54.300But there does seem to be two factors at play here.
00:26:57.600One is that we can't confirm a lot of that has happened.
00:27:01.480So every time we know where it came from, it seems to be close contact, you know, you're part of a ventilation system, you know, it's your spouse.
00:27:13.600You can usually determine there's some kind of pretty close, you know, intensive contact.
00:27:19.180But we don't actually have much, if any, evidence that somebody went to the hardware store and got it when they bought a hammer.
00:27:27.920I'm just going to use a crazy example, right?
00:27:29.980So there's no evidence that somebody just was away from everybody who had it, went to the store, bought a hammer, somebody else had touched the hammer, and now they got the coronavirus.
00:27:39.480Could happen, theoretically, but the evidence is that it's sort of not.
00:27:46.560So, could you protect, under those conditions, do we know enough to protect the people who are vulnerable?
00:27:53.000It seems like it's entirely about getting them away from other people and only about getting them away from intensive interactions.
00:28:01.540So if somebody needs to deliver some food, you know, relative needs to, you know, stand in the doorway and say hi, seems perfectly safe, you know, relative to the rest of the world, which is an unsafe place.
00:28:13.360So, here's another thing that you should consider.
00:28:20.760The total close down, or whatever you want to call it at the current situation, whatever this is,
00:28:27.340we probably want to take this as close as we can to the edge of destruction before we change, right?
00:28:37.280So, if we're doing this right, it should look worse and worse and worse until it looks so bad, we think we're going to lose the entire economy.
00:28:47.860And right there, right at that point where all the smart people say, okay, if you go one more inch, if you let this go on one more day, I don't know if we can get back.
00:28:59.320That's the day that we'll start getting back.
00:29:05.460Because that's the day the cost-benefit analysis just becomes obvious.
00:29:09.860At the moment, smart people are disagreeing where, where's just the right balance?