I'm not happy with the way things are going, and I'll tell you about that, but not until we have a little simultaneous sip of the thing that makes everything better: coffee. And join me for the unparalleled pleasure of the tip of the day: The Sip.
00:00:00.000Hey, hey everybody. Glad you could make it. Come on in. Gather round. We're going to set fire to the Republic today. It's time to go on offense.
00:00:27.000I'm not happy. I'm not happy with the way things are going. I'll tell you about that. But not until we have a little simultaneous sip. And what do you need to do that? Well, not much. Not much, really.
00:00:42.100All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
00:00:52.520And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine tip of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip. Go.
00:01:02.260Mmm. Tastes better than Trump pills. You know what Trump pills are, right? The Trump pills are the name I'm giving the combination of pills that are the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and zinc.
00:01:26.100Because I really hate writing those down and I hate pronouncing them. So from this day forward, hashtag Trump pills. Let's hope they work for his sake.
00:01:40.040All right. We're going to talk about some fun things and then some serious things.
00:01:46.200This podcast, which, so this Periscope gets turned into a YouTube for replay. You can see it on Periscope and replay, but also gets turned into just an audio only.
00:01:57.660And this week we hit number 77 on iTunes. So of all the podcasts in the world, of which I got to think there are quite a few, we've cracked the top 100 and it's number 77. It's good.
00:02:14.080Um, the New York Times has an article today that just got lost because, you know, nobody cares about anything except the coronavirus, but there's this researcher who figured out how to reverse aging.
00:02:29.240So while you are watching the crisis, you know, there's somebody over in a lab somewhere else like, oh, I just cured old age.
00:02:37.060Now, is it real? Well, we've heard this a few times, maybe not, but at least at the cellular level, they've figured out how to reverse the age of a cell.
00:02:50.400Now, it might take them a while to see if they can ramp that up into some kind of medicine that humans can use. I don't know if they'll get there or not.
00:02:57.980But it's just fun that in the middle of this crisis, the most dramatically, at least potentially, positive thing in the history of human civilization just happened.
00:03:10.440And nobody freaking cares. We don't care about it right now. Maybe it's good. Maybe it's good news. I don't know.
00:03:19.000So I said last night, and I'll say it again in case anybody missed my Periscope last night, the president putting the Easter data on this is just brilliant.
00:03:26.860It's good managing. It's good leadership. I said it before it happened, that we need at least their best guess.
00:03:35.480It can change. It can change. You know, if we need to make it shorter or longer, it can change.
00:03:42.160But it's really important to have an estimate out there. And now we have it.
00:03:46.360And I love the fact that the president picked Easter because it associates, you know, the resurrection with our economy beginning its resurrection.
00:03:55.100It's just sort of perfect. So I'm going to give some harsh grades today to the to the administration.
00:04:04.900But I want to start with the good news. So so I'm not just all angry all day.
00:04:09.120The good news is I think setting the date is brilliant. I think closing the China travel early was brilliant.
00:04:15.020I think closing the European travel. Strong move. I think the team is very strong.
00:04:21.240I like the I like the the updates every day. Those are great.
00:04:26.200And there's a ton of stuff happening. All right.
00:04:28.860So there's a whole bunch of stuff. If you're being fair, if you can remove yourself from the politics a little bit,
00:04:35.400there's a whole bunch of stuff that the administration is really doing well.
00:04:38.640But there are things that aren't. And we'll talk about those and what to do about it.
00:04:46.260But first, I'd like to point out, and this will dovetail into the the meat of the conversation.
00:04:53.040I've been saying for a while that the the republic has evolved.
00:04:57.060No longer do we elect smart people, have them ride their horse off to Washington and make some votes for us.
00:05:04.080Maybe we find out someday what they did. That was the original system.
00:05:08.560It was fine in a world with no social media and people weren't that connected communication wise.
00:05:15.980But now we are. And I've argued that the the republic has already evolved.
00:05:20.920So there's social media is effectively running the country for anything that social media cares enough about.
00:05:28.540You know, there's ninety nine percent of government we don't really care about.
00:05:31.620It's, you know, collecting the garbage sort of stuff.
00:05:34.660But for the one percent that we get excited about and the public can understand at some level,
00:13:57.560If we had done it that way, that's the old traditional way, our government would know what we have, what we're making, what we need, what's in the pipeline.
00:14:08.320If the government controlled it and just said, you factory, you factory, you factory, how many can you make?
00:14:54.820All these companies stepping up to do something, except because of that, we have no visibility.
00:15:03.540I don't believe there's anybody in the government who has visibility of all the companies who have stepped up and what they're doing and what should be done.
00:15:11.940So because we're doing it this way, instead of the government saying, you factory, make 20,000, you factory, make 30,000, in which case the government would know exactly what's in the pipeline.
00:15:21.960I don't think they know, and I think we have a system in which they can't know, because it's people acting independently and just trying to figure it out.
00:15:31.320Here's what I recommend for a solution.
00:15:36.540Since we've already gone this path, we're not going to reverse it now, but that's the path we're on.
00:27:12.060So, I'll tell you what to know to prove to your doctor that you understand enough to get it off-label, because they can give it to you legally off-label without a test.
00:27:24.000So, they don't go to jail if they give you the drug.
00:27:36.900Waiting for the test is the Afghanistan-Obama strategy, to let some centralized thing slow down the process that you know needs to be fast.
00:27:45.400Here are the things you want to tell your doctor.
00:27:49.040Number one, every doctor either is taking it, planning to take it, or has already stockpiled it.
00:27:56.020Look at your doctor in the fucking eyes and say,
00:27:59.380Tell me you won't take this for yourself if you get the symptoms.
00:28:04.820Look me in the eye and tell me that you're going to wait five days for a test if your spouse starts a dry cough.
00:29:16.320Do you think you should take a $20 test that you can take immediately and take the odds of you worsening down to pretty low, according to anecdotally everything that's happening?
00:29:27.920Or do you want to take a $1,000 test and wait five days and you might be dead before the test comes in?
00:30:14.280There are plenty of anecdotes that your doctor will be familiar with them of somebody who wasn't that bad and suddenly, you know, it's time for the ventilator.
00:35:48.780So Dan Patrick's point of view was that people over 70 would be willing to take the risk of sort of normalizing the economy because even though they're the ones most likely to die, they also want to leave a functioning economy for their grandchildren and children.
00:36:06.780And so Dan Patrick was saying quite bravely that he would take that risk because it's for the greater good.
00:36:19.440If it were for the greater good, I would say, well, that's pretty noble.
00:36:24.380You know, I would have like a ton of respect for somebody who said, you know, I'm in the danger zone and even I'm going to take a chance because I don't want it to hurt the rest of you.
00:41:04.080So CNN had a headline that says, Physician on Trump's Request, colon, It's Really Impossible.
00:41:13.420So if you saw this headline, Physician on Trump's Request.
00:41:18.020Now, the topic was, Trump was mentioning that maybe some of the N95 masks, not all of them, but some of them could be sterilized and reused.
00:42:05.160She's not some, this random physician, you know, who has some expertise about the disease probably, does not have expertise on designing and testing and sanitizing N95 masks.
00:42:18.860And to her credit, did not offer an opinion because she's a doctor and she's not an expert on sanitizing and N95 masks of some type.
00:42:31.820I'm pretty sure nobody is because nobody's really had to worry about it before.
00:42:35.440So this is just grotesquely fake news.
00:42:41.260The headline doesn't have any correlation with the actual story.