Episode 872 Scott Adams： Ask Me Anything For the Simultaneous Swaddle
Episode Stats
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Summary
It's time to swaddle in the swaddle! In this episode, we talk about the shortage of a key drug, hydroxychloroquine, and how we can solve it. We also talk about a new device that can turn a single ventilator into two ventilators, and a new invention that can double the capacity of existing ones.
Transcript
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bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum hey everybody hey dan come on in
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here hope you have your soft mic is on it's time to swaddle simultaneous swaddle in effect
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well have there ever been more news filled days than these my goodness my goodness let me tell
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you about some of the things that are happening somebody has invented a two-way valve that
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turns a ventilator into two ventilators all it is is a t-connection
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modifying i i assume they saw people modifying ventilators on their own and they said well we'll
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just make a part and it's just this little t-connector you just stick it in and boom you've
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doubled your ventilator capacity pretty cool pretty cool
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so india the country of india which uh is either the biggest producer of hydroxychloroquine
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which i call the hashtag trump pills because i don't like trying to figure out how to say the big
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words so the trump pills are the hydroxychloroquine and the azithromycin and the zinc just call them
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trump pills hashtag trump pills so anyway the uh india is one of the biggest producers of the
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one that starts with age and they just announced a uh block on exports so one of if not the biggest
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country that makes the drug that everybody needs right now and appears to be in at least a little
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bit of shortage in places i don't know how much we don't have visibility on that but the biggest
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country just decided that they're not going to give it to anybody else now is that because it doesn't
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work do you think that the country of india you've heard of india probably it's a country yeah you've
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heard that they have a lot of people there quite a few people you may have heard that there are smart
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people in india which is a great understatement there are really really smart people in india
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do you think that all the smartest people in india who again are really really really smart
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do you think that they blocked exports of this drug because it doesn't work maybe
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no no no they do not well so the citizens of this country are ready to break the system
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um i think that people are we've been lied to let's let's be honest but not necessarily an evil lie
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meaning that it's pretty obvious at this point that all of the countries uh see the trump pills as
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a big part of the solution and they're doing everything they can to make sure they secure
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their sources now i assume that the united states is doing the same and i assume that our government
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quite responsibly i would say has lied to us but it's a responsible lie because if you if you're
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trying to protect a limited resource it's kind of the only way to do it so i'm going to say that uh
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my moral uh i would say my moral line was not crossed by any of that probably had to be done
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but um i would say the cat's under the bag at this point so what i'd like is some visibility
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on how much do we have how much do we need you know where in this country is there a shortage
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how do we make it do we even make it in this country i know there's at least one is it no
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novartis there's at least one company that makes it and it's an american company but i don't think
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they make it in america so would they have the same problem if if the company whatever country they
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make it in what if they say there's no exports you know if it's an american company that has a
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manufacturing in another country can we get it out how does that work because it seems like
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just hypothetically if it were if it had been manufactured in india do you think india would
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let it leave the country just because it's owned by an american company i don't think so not in an
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emergency probably not so there's a big question in my mind um about this i think it's increasingly
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clear that the difference between trump's more optimistic view about getting back to work
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and dr fauci's more reserved approach both of them productive i think i think that they
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they sort of mapped out the zone you know one on the little bit to the cautious side one a little bit
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to the optimistic side and that gave you that gave you the zone i think we would have been
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underserved by having one without the other i think i think we would be underserved but this
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guy gives you a size a sense of the range that reasonable people can can think about and it's
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obvious now that part of the difference was that trump had some early indication that the the meds
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would be productive and dr fauci was probably cleverly i'm not i can't read their minds but it's a
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reasonable speculation that he knew there would be shortage problems if he touted it and so he was
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downplaying a little bit so i think that's where we are i think now it's just sort of obvious now
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you don't need to go and tell all your friends this you know you you can simply bank the advantage
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that you get to hear things that other people are not hearing on the regular news
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so uh don't necessarily tell your friends but just just know that you're a little bit ahead of the
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uh yeah so there's only to the best of my knowledge there's only one study that said it didn't work
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and that came out of a chinese university uh at the same time that everything coming out of chinese
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uses misinformation so i think you can really discount the chinese study uh let me throw you
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here's a conspiracy theory for you the following uh cannot be proven
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and i wouldn't go so far as to say i'm sure it's true but let me propose it and then you tell you
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use your own judgment everything you know about the world and and reach your reach your own conclusion
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is this reasonable and it goes like this one of the reasons that italy is doing so poorly
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is because china is helping them so that's the conspiracy theory and the conspiracy theory to
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round it out is that the last thing china wants is for italy to do really well
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why you might ask is it because they don't like italy no no it has nothing to do with italy
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it has to do with how china will look if they're the only ones that have a big problem
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china needed some other country to be the disaster country so that when we talk about
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but does that help include giving the italians large doses of the hydroxychloroquine
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i'm guessing no maybe because they told the italians it doesn't work so well
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maybe because they wanted to keep it for themselves maybe they didn't want anybody to know how well it
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worked some doctors did report on it but i don't think china can control every doctor's communication
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everywhere so the news got out but the only reason i can think of that italy would do
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so badly even even with the older population doesn't quite explain in my mind doesn't feel like
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that's the whole explanation it feels as though whatever it is italy is doing is different from
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what other countries are doing who also have infections something different and only italy is
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getting direct advice from china so i would at least put the suggestion out there that china's
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reputation the things that we do know about so this this speculation isn't something we have any
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hard evidence of but the things we do know about they're literally doing a disinformation campaign
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they steal our stuff there they've got the uyghurs in prison camp they're using the flown flown gone
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people for spare parts they're they're killing them to take their organs and selling them i mean these are
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just a few of the things we know about right if all of those things are true and i'm pretty sure they
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are is it a stretch to say that china would throw italy under the bus so that china would always look like
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they did a better job than than some other country would they be above that not at all in terms of
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ethically and morally they are they have demonstrated that they're not even a little bit above that
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so did china hurt italy's response more than it helped i think you have to put that in the
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possibility set you know we'll find out later if you find out later that china wasn't pushing the drugs
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that they know work then that's what it was and we'll probably know that you know at some point we'll
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find out whether italy was using that drug whether the chinese were advising them or what but we're
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going to know that um let's see nothing in our home from china for over three years now somebody says
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you know i was i was shopping before the lockdown it was just a few days before we all had to stop
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doing that and i was just picking things off the shelf and just looking at where they were made
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it's kind of hard not to buy something from china i didn't realize how hard it was
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now you heard that apple was helping out with the n95 masks right and today they announced that they
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had sourced some masks and they were going to deliver a bunch and i said to myself wait a minute
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source them are you telling me that apple computer doesn't know how to put up a manufacturing plant and
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make things and the answer is maybe not because i think everybody who everybody who says they're
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an american company and they're going to make you some face masks the part they don't say is well not
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in this country because we don't know how to do anything in this country we don't know how to make
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stuff so every time i heard a story of an american company that was going to make some masks you have
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to ask the second question is where are you going to make them oh we're making them in china or we're
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making them in india or we're making them in mexico i don't know if the i don't know if any american
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company can manufacture anything i don't even know if it's a thing so when i see apple stepping up to
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help and all they did is act as a broker to find some masks that were somewhere else i mean maybe they
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helped them get going on it or something but not exactly what i was expecting from american companies
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now i have not dug into the um the relief legislation by the way did that get approved
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where is that i've been off the news for a little while but i have i'm starting to develop an opinion
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which is that it's a complete abomination it looks like the republicans and the democrats
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just completely failed us completely failed us when when the nation needed them most
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they weren't even a little bit willing to do it right not even a little bit willing yeah so
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the my pillow company apparently is making some masks and you're right those probably are made in
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america so there is i guess there is one guy you know one company anyway the my pillow company they
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i guess they do know how to make things in america because they make the pillows there
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um somebody says 3m makes m95 in south dakota oh okay so that's good so we do have a little bit of
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american manufacturing somebody says the issue is ventilators yeah um i think the meds once they're
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available will make ventilators less necessary because people won't get hospitalized hospitalized in
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the first place all right let's talk about zoom did you know that zoom so it's a company that allows
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you very easily to do uh teleconferencing with lots of different configurations you know one to many and
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several and all that and it is a really good product i gotta say so i've used zoom quite a bit and
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every time i use it i'm frankly impressed it's just really well designed it's it's pretty bulletproof for
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these kinds of things you know the telecommunications is always going to have glitches but it's really
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bulletproof really easy interface just everything about it is is quality so they deserve to be doing
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well and everybody's using them for business now but there's one little problem it's an american company
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but much or most of their engineering and even one of their data centers is in china
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so if you are a big american company and you're talking about top secret things on zoom your conversation
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is going to china into a chinese data center server and then you know sent over to the other side
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now hypothetically could the government of china listen in on every business conversation that happens
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on zoom well in theory no because it's an american company and they they must have some control over
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their technology even in china but in reality of course some number of the employees there are just
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chinese spies now do i know that no but do i know that yes let me say that again do i know that there are
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chinese spies working for zoom no i have no information about that whatsoever do i know that chinese spies are
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working at zoom yes yes i do a hundred percent because why wouldn't they are you crazy why wouldn't
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they of course they are now and if they weren't they will and if they if they haven't yet they could
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and they will so it doesn't even matter if they haven't done it yet it's almost a trivial point
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the point is it is such an enormous security conflict for a country who is most famous for stealing
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intellectual property and our most important companies are having their their highly confidential
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conversations because when you when you're talking it doesn't feel like it's a security problem
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right we're used to the telephone so you don't want to put something on text somebody can find
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it but i'll make a phone call because nobody's recording my phone call right well how hard would
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it be for some technology to just check the language and look for keywords and then record anything that
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had some interesting keywords pretty easy pretty easy so that is a big um problem now also the app
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tick tock is owned by china and that app knows a lot about you and it might even have asked you
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permission to post things on social media if you did the government of china gets to
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gets to follow and unfollow people on your behalf and you'd never know the difference now is that happening
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my theory is that twitter management is not intentionally rigging anything
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but that something's getting rigged there's something clearly getting rigged and so it's
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got to be some third party so it's either hackers or apps or there's some internal you know internal
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person who's working for the wrong government or something but uh yeah twitter is clearly compromised
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in terms of some kind of influence but i don't think it's twitter and i don't think that they have a
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way necessarily even find out what's going on but we know what's going on i mean that that part's
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confirmed it's easy to tell that it's going on all right where is our zoom exactly where is the american
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company that's knocking that off or actually better yet you know since zoom is an american
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company ideally they would just bring their servers back here which which i think should be a law
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actually i think there should be legislation that if you're a telecommunication product it just can't
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go through china you know that we have precedent for that of course so does anybody want to ask some
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questions i've got my headset on it looks like some people are coming in
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let's uh add carpe carpe donctum are you there hey good to hear from you you have a question for me
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and stuff like that so you know i'm not a conspiracy guy but yeah i was hoping that uh that you could
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provide some imagination that maybe i laugh okay my now my my question is that uh we're hearing lots of
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things out of new york city about um lots of people in there on ventilators and uh big lines and we're
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we're hearing about uh the recent most recently there was something about a guy dying in the waiting room
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waiting for a bed right and my question is in the world of selfies and people who are constantly
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going live and people who are constantly recording video and uploading it why are we not seeing viral
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videos of packed emergency rooms and uh hospitals full of ventilators uh good question i will give
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you a possible answer i would say that within the within the hospital they probably don't want to
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touch phones because phones are just like germ machines so they might not have phones in any of
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the places where you would also have ventilators that's possible and probable i'd say um secondly if
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you're in the waiting room there are big signs that say you know don't use your cell phone now
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i think they're talking about phone calls but i think most people would realize if they took their phone out
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in a medical facility it's just such a grotesque violation of privacy it could be that just people
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don't do it or it could be that they've done it and they keep it to themselves because they don't
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want to be accused of violating somebody's privacy because it's an immense violation right and i
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understand i don't understand all that and the the hipaa violations and privacy and everything but i i
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guess the heart of my question is that you know nobody nobody abides by those things in any other
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situation yeah so it's just very strange to me that uh that we're not seeing at least one or two live
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streams coming from that room well i'll tell you i have been to uh my health care providers waiting
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room not not recently because of the crisis and um i was the only person using a phone i think
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yeah really it was like nobody took their phone out but i did you know just texting and stuff
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so um so i i get what you're saying so the the implication is if things were as bad as the
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reports we would surely have visual evidence of that and that's actually a good observation
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but within the the medical uh domain you would expect a little less video than any other domain
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and i want to i want to reiterate that um i'm not suggesting anything like i'm not suggesting that this
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is a giant hoax or anything like that i'm just asking a simple question that that i i feel like
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should have an answer but yeah i'm getting a lot of pushback from from people don't ask that question
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that seems like a pretty that's a pretty fair question but the other thing might be that i think
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the the bad spots are spots so if you got to the point where every hospital in new york was you know
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was a a death center then you know the odds of a video are pretty high but if most of them are kind
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of okay but you had you know a couple of bad days at one where somebody died in the waiting room i don't
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know that people would take out their phone yeah so so we're sort of in the gray area where i i could
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see why it wouldn't happen but the longer it goes and the worse it gets reportedly the longer we go and
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don't see video then that's perfectly valid question thanks for that all right yep see you all right
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take care that was a good question oh look at all these people who want to talk to me let's do jason
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jason are you there jason can you hear me do you have a question
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saying is the epicenter and um it seems to me you know just being here that uh that's not the case
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that it's very much overblown and um you know there are people obviously getting sick there is a lot of
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social distancing uh but it doesn't seem nearly as bad as they're saying and i have i've seen a lot of
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reports new york times had one that there were people dying waiting for beds etc um i i just don't see that
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uh that uh that had actually being backed up but how but how would you see that my my understanding
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is is it new york city where they've ordered refrigerated trucks for all the bodies yeah
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where the only place you would see it is right in the hospital um so unless you're in the hospital
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you shouldn't be seeing anything so i i mean i happen to know personally a lot of doctors uh who you
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know family members in my social circle that right now are working are working in hospitals
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uh in westchester in lower manhattan um and i haven't heard anything like that i just i think
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i would have heard that it was a horror story like that so i just i think we should see we should really
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see what's going on it seems to me to be uh a little overblown well my my understanding is if
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you're looking you if you're looking at it as a snapshot in time then you're just looking at the wrong
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thing because everything is about the rate so they delivered 4 000 ventilators which if you're
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taking a snapshot would probably be you know 3500 ventilators more than they need right away
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but since they think they might need 20 000 um we're not talking about a snapshot of today we're
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talking about the direction it's gone and all the experts saying if you don't clamp it down it'll
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it'll turn into a disaster so i i feel like the experts are giving you the amount of warning
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that is appropriate to next week even more than appropriate at the moment and maybe that's what
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you're feeling that the alarm the alarm is sort of a next week alarm so you're not seeing it on the
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ground yet so that's my best guess but all right thanks thanks for the question all right see what
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let's see what else we got here let's take uh brian brian you look like you have a question brian brian
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brian disappeared let's try tracy tracy talk to me tracy you have a question
00:25:01.380
sir my sister lives in manhattan in manhattan and she's been quarantining herself because she's been
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ill with an inner ear problem and she was just telling me she went to the hospital today to to
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see a rehab person to help her with this maneuver they have to do she has crystals in her ears that are
00:25:23.780
out of whack and she said the hospital was not busy at all she doesn't know what i'm talking about when
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i talked to her about the coronavirus because she said she was the only patient that this rehab woman
00:25:36.340
had today well so that's exactly what it should look like if it's really an emergency you get that
00:25:43.380
right so the way it should look like is they've canceled all the elective surgery and they've they've
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massively increased their capacity in anticipation of what next week and the week after look like so
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what you saw is exactly what it should look like in some hospitals they haven't been hit but they expect
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to so i think that's all you're saying now of course we could be wrong but thank you thanks for the
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question uh we you know anything could happen i'm curious what's going to happen if we do a really
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good job of beating the virus and everybody's going to say see i told you it wasn't real
00:26:17.460
omar are you there omar omar come on technology work it's cooking trying to get omar on there but
00:26:33.300
looks like that's not going to work for some reason all right let's try somebody else let's try james
00:26:41.460
james can you hear me if we have oh there you are james do you have a question
00:26:57.140
hello do you have a question um it's it's a bit one-sided but um so we talked about the coronavirus
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coming from china could this i mean just saying this is just a theory not saying they actually
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did it but could this be as a could this be a test in a way that you could realign like all the
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manufacturing is coming from china but in a way putting emphasis on it like medical supplies and
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everything to be more based in china uh well i think the the result of this will be less stuff based in
00:27:33.940
china because we'll be pulling our supply lines back so so china will be worse off so if you're
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trying to imagine that somebody intentionally uh let the virus out you'd have to say to yourself okay
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who could gain by such a thing now in my opinion nobody did it intentionally i think that's it's uh
00:27:52.660
very very unlikely but if you want to go through the mental exercise you'd say who could possibly win
00:27:59.540
by a virus that is not selective i mean it's a little selective by age but not not by country
00:28:06.260
so if you couldn't control it by ethnicity or country nobody would let that out i mean nobody who knew what
00:28:13.380
they had would let it out so that that would leave the possibility that they thought it would act some
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other way but even that sounds impossible so i i reject all of the intentional um
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um theories but that doesn't mean that it didn't get out of a some kind of a research lab because
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they could have had it for research that doesn't mean that they meant it to get out or that it was a
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weapon all right thank you for the questions all right um so you saw me uh let me go back to that
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you saw me uh block uh somebody here because they said uh look how you panicked scott now i don't know
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how many times i need to tell you this the in in the early part of the um you know just knowing that
00:29:06.820
the pandemic was coming the experts said if we don't do anything it will turn into x and you know
00:29:15.540
a million million people die so i quoting the experts also said if we don't do anything
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that will happen that's still true but we are doing things so those of you who have come to mock me
00:29:31.540
because i said it could be this bad unless we do something you're you just don't belong here you
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just can't be here you're not smart enough if you don't know the difference between what it looks like
00:29:45.540
if you don't do anything and what it looks like if you try really hard to stop it you just you just
00:29:52.180
can't be here you have to find some other form of entertainment you don't you don't understand the
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basics right i said to prepare um big and which is smart and anybody who prepared is probably pretty
00:30:06.340
happy about it because you have toilet paper so certainly uh mike cernovich was the um the superstar
00:30:14.420
of the early and correct predictions on this nobody nobody comes close to what he was saying and how early
00:30:21.140
but um and i saw an article that was saying that the the people who also saw trump coming early
00:30:31.300
tended to be the same people who saw the uh coronavirus early and i thought that was a good
00:30:37.140
observation because it's kind of true you know bannon me mike cernovich uh uh several others but we were
00:30:46.100
the the the people who saw trump early saw this as well is that a coincidence might not be so all
00:30:54.100
right um let me take another question here since i got a lot of people waiting let's see what sven is up to
00:31:04.420
sven i'm coming to you because i like your name can you hear me sven do you have a question
00:31:16.100
um after all this is over how do you want to see kind of the united states change um socially
00:31:26.260
governmentally well you know some of it will be changes that we didn't realize were changes you
00:31:33.940
know that there'll be massive changes just about how we do things to keep viruses from spreading
00:31:39.300
there'll be massive you know financial changes and dislocations so there'll be all kinds of fairly
00:31:44.500
predictable ones but the fun ones are the ones that you don't really feel and see you just sort of
00:31:50.260
notice it after the fact and one of them is uh what i keep talking about is that our government is no
00:31:56.580
longer really the government making decisions they're they're kind of taking their cue from the public
00:32:02.820
and from social media as it as it represents the public and so this idea of the of the public
00:32:08.660
being almost an equal partner with the government and and informing them and working with them and
00:32:15.220
you know pushing and pulling uh that that's a big deal because it's a whole new form it's a whole new
00:32:21.860
form of government that simply didn't exist until social media made it so now the other thing uh
00:32:28.580
that we're getting out of this is that a whole bunch of people met each other who would not have otherwise
00:32:33.700
met and by that i mean the scientists and the the benefit of you know cross fertilizing a bunch of
00:32:41.460
scientists this could be tremendous could be tremendous the amount of sharing they're probably
00:32:45.860
permanently connected at some point so the next the next pandemic can be that much better
00:32:52.020
but one of the other one of the other sort of unexpected big elements of this is that for how
00:32:59.860
many years have the green new deal people been telling us that we should do you know this this
00:33:05.220
big massive society changing expensive trillion dollar thing to address this one problem now without
00:33:13.140
arguing whether or not we should or whether or not you know the science is right or anything like that
00:33:18.180
forget about that for now just the fact of how do you manage your risks and i've been saying from
00:33:24.820
the beginning if you put all of your money in this climate change thing you've missed other gigantic
00:33:31.380
risks that you would be broke for example and i always said pandemic so that was on my short list i
00:33:37.220
would always say pandemic you know meteor climate change you can't spend all of your money on any one of
00:33:43.700
them so you have to figure out the right mix and i think that that lesson went from um just sort of
00:33:50.980
academic and people hear it and immediately forget it to oh my god we can't spend all of our money on
00:33:57.460
the green new deal and i think that the green new deal probably lost a lot of support in terms of
00:34:06.180
at least the energy behind it you know people the same people who supported it will continue to support
00:34:10.740
it but i don't know if it has the same heat anymore because now it's kind of obvious that we would
00:34:17.220
have been in a lot of trouble if we had started three years ago to become a socialist uh you know
00:34:23.300
socialist world and we we just you know put our whole budget into the the green new deal we would
00:34:29.300
kind of wish we had that economic strength now so a bunch of things what's that we would have been
00:34:36.180
pretty screwed in that case yeah yeah so the the trump doctrine of making sure that you're as strong as
00:34:43.220
possible because that gives you the most flexibility against the most different threats i think it's
00:34:48.420
proven and and so thanks thanks for the question thank you all right we're going to take another caller
00:34:56.340
let's take alex who got here early and you should be rewarded for this if you're still there alex
00:35:10.020
about uh robert cialdini yes and do you think that uh he is gun shy since uh he pushed the whole trump
00:35:21.860
is dark issue in the last election uh well i can't read his mind i i heard or read that he wasn't going to
00:35:31.540
be involved in politics um again you know he's i think he's in his early 70s and i think he was
00:35:38.980
you know maybe thinking that was a younger man's game or something but i'd be surprised if he hasn't been
00:35:44.260
asked to consult for somebody you know bernie or somebody else and i'd be surprised if he had been asked
00:35:51.700
that he didn't give at least a little bit of advice so i don't know and i can't get in his head or what
00:35:56.900
he's thinking but it would be surprising if somebody of that skill set had not been consulted
00:36:03.860
because remember he did work on the obama election so we we know that and uh he probably worked on
00:36:10.660
hillary clinton's because you could see his fingerprints on it so why wouldn't he i mean
00:36:14.900
it seems like they would ask him so yeah i just think he would be a little embarrassed if he had two
00:36:20.020
losses on his uh on his crib sheet well you know nobody nobody counts it that way it just looks
00:36:26.260
that way to you and he'd he'd probably say you know well must have been some voter suppression or
00:36:32.900
something i don't know yeah i don't i i don't want to put words in his head so i have no idea what
00:36:36.820
he's thinking but just the general point that people have reasons just because they don't look
00:36:42.020
obvious to you doesn't mean they don't have reasons all right all right thanks scott thanks for the
00:36:47.060
question senator mark is here hello senator um let's see if steve has a question for me
00:36:59.460
steve steve went away i think people get shy or maybe they're not really signed up here gabriel i want
00:37:07.380
to talk to you gabriel gabriel can you hear me do you have a question
00:37:17.220
i was reading a recent document stating that uh i guess the uk government downgraded
00:37:24.020
uh coronavirus to you know i guess whatever lower tier there is aside from like hantavirus and uh
00:37:31.540
you know some of the more scarier things out there right but uh i was curious uh
00:37:38.100
you know i i don't want to i don't want to like ask people to place a wager on this
00:37:42.420
and this is leading to something else but what are the odds you think that we can get
00:37:58.340
oh here's what i think is going to happen i think that the the final death count will be shockingly low
00:38:05.860
and way lower than seasonal flu but only because it's a full core press i mean we close down the
00:38:12.020
economy i mean we're just doing you know herculean efforts so between the fact that the med the meds
00:38:20.500
seem to really be effective and once those come online this looks like a completely different
00:38:26.900
problem once you have enough test cats test kits once you have enough ventilators once you have
00:38:32.660
enough meds and protective equipment once you have enough supplies and that's guaranteed to happen
00:38:39.380
i think this becomes more trivial but and but uh but until we're armed we're some somewhat unarmed
00:38:46.580
and we've been on you know defensive retreat but we're just starting to turn the corner and and
00:38:52.020
weapons are going to go hot in the next week or so and then then we're going on offense offense will
00:38:57.540
be a lot more fun go ahead lastly i work as a pharmacist and one thing i would say is that
00:39:05.060
perhaps this will help us actually better approach the flu in upcoming seasons because yeah some of
00:39:14.100
these practices would definitely prevent some of the thousands and thousands you know deaths that
00:39:18.980
happen you know most years right yeah i would think i would think that the one of the unintended
00:39:26.180
consequences is that regular flu is either more treatable maybe they find something that works on
00:39:32.180
it or or at the very least our practices get so much better that there's just less of it so yeah
00:39:37.620
i'm optimistic about that as well all right right thank you for the question
00:39:41.140
all right um gabriel is one of the people i see on twitter making smart comments so i was happy to talk
00:39:55.700
caller went away caller does not want to talk to me let's try omar again
00:40:04.580
good good do you have a question for me i do i do but first of all uh just wanted to thank you for
00:40:14.500
all your hard work every day you're getting on twice a day just to make everybody feel better uh
00:40:19.940
put on the right filters for us um you're your national treasure scott and i i just want to thank
00:40:24.820
you very much for that well um so i i think i think everybody all over the country are jumping in and
00:40:31.700
doing what they can do so you know that's that's the fun part is people just say what can i do you
00:40:36.820
know what what am i good at and then they're just doing it so it's it's pretty it's pretty sensational
00:40:41.940
did you have a question yes i do i do so uh i'm not going to read your mind but i'm assuming that you
00:40:48.420
were just as pissed off as i was about uh the uh um stimulus bill uh today as it seems like uh
00:40:58.340
it's corporate socialism where big corporations are getting helped out and the average man is
00:41:04.260
getting fucked over so my question to you is that since it's not necessarily that uh individuals
00:41:12.420
should be bailed out on their needs you know these corporations are being bailed out based on our need
00:41:17.860
for them so that makes them a utility so shouldn't the government put some kind of parameters as to
00:41:23.140
how they're able to use the bailout money so they don't just give each other promotions and stock
00:41:28.340
buybacks yeah um and i i haven't dug into the details but i know the president wanted that basically
00:41:35.460
everybody wanted it so if everybody who was talking in public wanted it and it didn't happen
00:41:40.740
then there must have been some lobbyist effect there but i would have to say that um congress failed
00:41:47.220
miserably just just failed right in front of us in a way that is somewhat spectacular because they
00:41:54.980
you know they may or may not sign something it sounded like the president was going to be pretty
00:41:59.140
flexible and he wasn't he wasn't gonna he wasn't gonna go to war about you know 25 million for this
00:42:05.140
25 million for that as long as they had a reason you know he may not prefer it but at least you know
00:42:10.260
get the country back in the road and i don't i don't think the president's wrong about that
00:42:14.180
i think that he is actually playing as smart he's being complimentary to everybody in congress even
00:42:21.140
though he shouldn't be you know based on their performance he should be uh castigating them but
00:42:26.100
i think he's playing it correctly he's smartly saying you know congress is congress if they can't do
00:42:32.260
better than that i'm going to take what i can get but i need this i need something not nothing so
00:42:37.380
something's better than nothing but um if congress's credibility could get any lower i just don't know
00:42:45.380
how i mean this i'm not really the guy who wants to criticize congress all the time because it's just so
00:42:52.260
easy and obvious and you know perpetual but wow this feels like a whole new level of incompetence
00:42:59.300
because you sort of imagined that when it was a national emergency they would they would let the
00:43:04.580
little stuff go and just focus but they did not they didn't even a little bit they failed us
00:43:10.420
completely and everybody involved with that should be removed from office in my opinion yeah no i agree
00:43:17.620
there's a one thing i wanted to mention something interesting i learned from a friend of mine who's
00:43:22.660
a chinese national but you know alibaba is actually uh fully functioning and they function very well during
00:43:28.500
the quarantine or during this uh the covet crisis and i didn't know why but something that i didn't
00:43:34.580
know was back in the early 2000s i believe when sars happened alibaba had to go through this whole
00:43:40.660
pandemic themselves and they had to self-quarantine the entire company so they were actually really
00:43:45.380
well prepared to handle this and i'm wondering if because the u.s companies all went through this
00:43:50.340
themselves that in the next 10 or 20 or 30 years if this were to happen again we would essentially be
00:43:56.180
anti-fragile in our in our economy do you think so yeah i think it depends when it happens if we wait
00:44:02.180
20 years and we don't have a pandemic in that time we'll probably get soft budgets will get caught and
00:44:07.620
we'll get you know we'll get complacent but i would say if a pandemic comes back in three years
00:44:13.700
we're really going to be ready you know it'll be fresh you won't have to tell people what to do
00:44:19.860
you know we'll just go into our routine so it kind of depends when but yes i think that's one of the
00:44:24.340
big benefits is we're going to come out ahead preparation wise and we'll be a much hardened
00:44:30.100
society when we're done that's my hope last last thing and i'll let you go scott again thank you for
00:44:36.260
the time i know that you know you you're on instagram now and love your pics but i'm going to suggest
00:44:41.380
something you should try and tell me what you end up seeing like a few tick tock instagram videos
00:44:48.500
and you'll get retargeted by a variety of these very impressive uh app companies for photos ar you
00:44:57.060
know vote video editing all of which not only are coming out of china but they also happen to be
00:45:03.060
coming out of wuhan and i just thought it was very very strange i kept seeing this so try that on your
00:45:09.060
end see see what you end up finding okay i'll i'll look for that all right thanks all right take care
00:45:25.140
see if alec has a question alec do you have a question alec
00:45:28.580
okay sounds like it's raining uh i'll get into a quieter place in one second uh my question is
00:45:40.900
what do you think what's your prediction on what's going to happen once this blows over or once we get
00:45:46.260
a handle of it uh in places like iran and hong kong do you believe the protests will return in full
00:45:54.500
force or is it a little bit too foggy to tell too foggy to tell because uh the even the protesters
00:46:02.180
are not going to want to gather so at the moment the more more virus there is in iran you know maybe
00:46:09.220
the regime is even safer because people just don't want to get in the same place but let's say we get
00:46:14.900
past the virus and people are no longer afraid to gather in public iran has a lot to explain you know
00:46:21.780
they need to explain the shooting down the ukraine airline the bad economy they need to explain why
00:46:27.700
they're a pariah they need to explain why their economy is the worst they need to explain why the
00:46:33.140
the virus was so bad there and less bad in other places so uh it's gonna hurt but on the other hand
00:46:40.020
so just if you just look at all the psychology that goes into that there is something about a national
00:46:45.700
emergency that does make people also pull together and put a little more trust in the
00:46:51.540
regime even if they hated him yesterday so it could work either way so i we're squarely in the
00:46:56.980
fog of war situation but good question thank you thank you all right take care um
00:47:14.420
eric eric eric eric can you hear me do you have a question
00:47:21.540
why didn't the president set the pace more on the goodies in the bill like you know the payments
00:47:29.940
directly to workers directly to interest-free small business loans and then of course then when
00:47:36.900
all the big corporate stuff has to happen to the big bailouts well he blames that on congress
00:47:41.860
it kind of seems like he's been sitting back and letting the bill just kind of happen rather than
00:47:48.420
getting out in front taking credit for the good stuff yeah you know here's here's what i would
00:47:53.060
have liked to have seen i would have liked to see the president say uh both parties have failed us
00:47:58.980
here's your bill uh you know i need you to vote on this by tomorrow because i think the president
00:48:04.420
could just say you know here's what you gave us with all this pork here's what the republicans
00:48:09.380
wanted that basically is a giveaway to big business according to people who looked at it more than i
00:48:14.980
have i think the president could have said i know what it looks like when you're not doing either
00:48:19.460
of those things so here it is vote on it by tomorrow it's an emergency i think he could have done it in
00:48:25.540
any in any other circumstance of course you know that wouldn't work but i think he could shine enough
00:48:30.900
light on it to just embarrass them now let me give you an example if the president had said look you've
00:48:36.820
completely screwed the pooch on this it's too complicated it's too divisive it's it's just the wrong is
00:48:43.300
wrong in every way here's what we're going to do we're going to give everybody three thousand dollars
00:48:48.420
that's it and then the people who didn't deserve it people like me who you know my income is at
00:48:55.540
least some of it will be intact after this is over we'll probably be down about a third from newspapers
00:49:00.900
that go into business forever but um people like me i just want to fill out my taxes i just say yeah
00:49:07.300
i got three thousand dollars but i didn't deserve it so i'll give it give it back to you at tax time
00:49:11.460
it's the easiest because you don't even have to worry about the claw back until later you don't
00:49:17.460
have to worry that somebody got the got the money you based on last year but this was a bad year you
00:49:22.580
don't have to worry about any of that you just say boom here's your money corporations get nothing
00:49:28.420
now should corporations get nothing and will they go out of business and i think the answer is
00:49:33.300
no if the government wants to help companies stay in business and it's just a generally it's a short
00:49:39.620
cash flow problem well that's what banks do you know maybe maybe the government could guarantee
00:49:45.140
in some cases or the government could take equity they don't like that but the government could why
00:49:50.500
can't we make a profit on this why can't the government say yeah i'll help you out boeing
00:49:55.300
but uh you know i own ten percent of your company and when the stock goes back up i'm going to sell
00:49:59.620
because i'm not in the stock business i'm just helping you out so it feels to me that the government
00:50:06.180
could have done lots of stuff to make sure that the big companies at least have funding but we would
00:50:10.820
get paid back and it seems to me we could just directly give cash to people and if the wrong
00:50:16.340
people got cash well they probably spend it anyway and that's good but they can claw it back so i think
00:50:24.100
the president had a high ground um play now i don't know the politics of washington you know maybe i'm
00:50:30.260
being a little too a little too idealistic about how easy things are but there are things you can do
00:50:35.540
in a in emergency that you just couldn't do other times and i got a feeling that the that the public
00:50:41.140
was so primed for leadership that the president could have said i'm putting it on one page
00:50:50.100
vote on this tomorrow and i don't even want to see that stuff that you handed me it is so far off the
00:50:56.660
american people should fire every one of you but here's my one pager give it to me tomorrow by
00:51:01.460
tomorrow yeah that would if i agree that would be a total home run for him cernovich has kind of
00:51:06.260
talked about how trump's kind of dropped some opportunities for himself to you know hit you know
00:51:15.380
that robot thanks for taking my call agree with all that take my call whatever all right thanks take
00:51:22.020
care uh getting pretty good questions today all all the smart people are here today
00:51:38.180
how about that oh sorry i knocked you off that was a fat finger my problem try somebody else tony
00:51:55.460
what's going on with new orleans if you heard anything about there it seems like that's going
00:51:59.460
to blow up really soon after new york well um probably you know i would expect that all the metro
00:52:07.620
areas are going to get hit some more than others and if they're vacation places and you know older
00:52:13.460
places and people are more crowded you know all the usual factors so i don't have any special intel
00:52:18.740
on that but uh i think like with mardi gras in late february there was a lot of seeds that got
00:52:26.740
yeah started my my understanding is that bourbon street just continued on until the police came in
00:52:33.220
and said what the heck get out of here so so i think they had to close down bourbon street the big
00:52:38.740
crowded area there all right thanks for questions all right well i seem to be pressing the wrong buttons
00:52:48.900
here and here let's try that all right that's all for today i will be back with you at 10 easter time
00:53:00.420
in the morning eastern not easter and 7 a.m california time for the simultaneous set but do not miss
00:53:06.980
do not miss it do not miss it uh i'm here to tell you that things are going to turn around it's all
00:53:13.140
about supplies now supplies the tests supplies the meds supplies of protective equipment and then we've
00:53:20.820
we go on offense we go on offense very close very close very close i'll see you in the morning