Episode 875 Scott Adams： Get in Here for the Sip. It's a Good One Today!
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
156.59958
Summary
The death rate in New York City is flattening. Is this good or bad? Is this a fluke? Is it a pandemic? Or is it something worse than we thought? And what can we do about it?
Transcript
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Everybody who's exercising right now, when you listen to my voice, you're doing exactly
00:00:44.940
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that
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makes everything, including the pandemic, better.
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It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
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Starting with, so I don't want to get ahead of myself because, you know, I tend toward the
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So, I'm going to put a little bit of a caveat on this, which is kind of wait and see what
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But as you know, I had been predicting that this week would be the week that we saw the
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death rate, not the infection rate, but the death rate in New York City flattened out.
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So, and the prediction was based on the fact that they got a big supply of the Trump pills.
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So, the Trump pills are the hydroxychloroquine combined with the azithromycin and maybe zinc,
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Apparently, they were starting to give it to people on Monday.
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And I said that in the next 48 hours or so, you should see the death curve start to flatten
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at the same time, and this was the key to the prediction, that you would see the number
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Now, part of that is because of better testing, right?
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But the other part, the bigger part probably is that it's just an infection.
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So, yesterday, the death rate was around 100-ish.
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But the day before, the death rate was also about 100-ish.
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Now, keep in mind that, you know, the day that you start administering the drug, you still
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have a whole bunch of people who should have had it earlier.
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So, in theory, the first thing you should see is a flattening, because, you know, I don't
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So, just assume that I don't have bad intentions here.
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But you have to kind of work through the backlog.
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The backlog of people who aren't going to make it.
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And for some of them, the medicines, even if they work, could be too late, especially
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So, what I would expect is a few days of flattening of the death rate, not the infection rate.
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But if the meds work to keep you alive, and we have enough to give it to you early, maybe
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upon your first visit with symptoms, instead of, you know, waiting until it's too late.
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I think, just to stay with the prediction, again, everything depends on, you know, either
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the hydroxychloroquine or some combination, it could be another med, but everything depends
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And they're doing a few, probably doing enough testing there that they're getting a sense
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So, don't want to get ahead of myself, but I did call this days in advance, right?
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And remember, I always tell you, look for the people who make public predictions, and
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then tell you later if they got it right or wrong.
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I will also tell you when I get stuff wrong, and I know you'll remind me if I forget.
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I said this would be the week if flattened, and I did.
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That's why I don't want to get ahead of myself with any optimism.
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But it is what I would, in the best case scenario, which is that we have some therapeutics which
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really make a difference, that's the best case scenario, it would look exactly like this.
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The World Health Organization, I'm trying to figure out whose side they're on.
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And for a while, because they're human beings, I said to myself, well, it's humans against
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It doesn't matter what country you are in, what party, what gender or ethnicity.
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At the moment, we're kind of all on the same team against the virus.
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But then I see, you know, but WHO is also saying that face masks were not that important
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This is from WHO, P-R-O, I don't know what the P-R-O stands for.
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And it's a little public service announcement looking thing.
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And it says, if you do not have any respiratory symptoms, such as a fever, a cough, or run
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in your nose, you do not need to wear a medical mask.
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When used alone, masks can give you a full sense of protection and can even be a source
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To which I say, have we not been hearing that asymptomatic shedding might be a
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How do people who are not showing symptoms yet, how do they transition from not showing
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Does it ever pass through a moment or two of coughing before you put your mask on?
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In other words, how do asymptomatic people, even theoretically, transmit the virus unless
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Is it on their hands, but somehow it got to their hands without coming from their mouth
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Is that what the World Health Organization is telling us?
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Does the asymptomatic spreading come out of your elbows?
00:07:00.380
I'm not a doctor, but if I had to guess, asymptomatic spreading might come out of your ass a little bit, but probably it's coming
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At the very least, there are some people who will just always be asymptomatic, but if they're
00:07:26.960
Now, some people pointed out that countries who went mask crazy, in other words, they just
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all wore masks, such as Japan and South Korea, also experienced a flattening of the curve far
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Now, that's anecdotal, because there's lots of other things that are different comparing
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But you'd at least have to raise the question, since we know these masks stop people with
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symptoms, why wouldn't it stop people who are asymptomatic, but somehow they're shedding,
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or they're transitioning from asymptomatic to symptomatic?
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Like, don't you want them to be wearing a mask during the transition?
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So, I don't think the World Health Organization is actually on our side.
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Somehow the virus managed to use cryptocurrency and bribe this organization.
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So, people who are not good at thinking are having a real tough time with this crisis.
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Now, when I say people who are not good at thinking, I'm talking about specifically two
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One is the thought that friction doesn't matter.
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That it doesn't matter if you put some friction on something.
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If it doesn't stop it completely, well, why do it?
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And so, I use this thought experiment, which some people reading it incorrectly believed was
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You can see it as an analogy, but it's better as a thought experiment.
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If all Americans were forced to go into a hot shooting war where there are actually bullets,
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and let's say there's no such thing as the military, where just all the citizens are going
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And the government said, all right, since every single one of you are going to be in a war
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zone with actual bullets flying around, we're going to issue you bulletproof vests and helmets.
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I think what we learned from the crisis is that 25% of the public would say, no thank you.
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I know I'm going into a war zone with bullets flying everywhere, but I don't need your bulletproof
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vest and I don't need your helmet because, duh, somebody can just shoot me in the neck.
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Why would I need a bulletproof vest and a helmet in a war zone if somebody could just shoot me
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So, now, if you're saying, Scott, that's an analogy to wearing masks and doing the smart things
00:10:16.120
during a pandemic, to which I say, you can think of it as an analogy, but it doesn't have to be.
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I just say it's a thought experiment for you to understand human beings.
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25% of human beings don't understand that friction matters.
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That reducing your risk even makes a difference.
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It's not a point about masks or no masks, but obviously, if masks can reduce your risk
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even a little bit in a pandemic, even just a little bit, of course you should be wearing them.
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If the only thing it did, as Brian Machiavelli on Twitter pointed out this morning, if the
00:11:04.660
only thing it did was keep you from touching your mouth during the day a few times, it's
00:11:13.580
Now, I think the real question might be availability of masks, but it seems like the one thing we
00:11:19.620
could fix, you know, maybe not N95 masks, but don't you think you could get, you know,
00:11:26.340
the 75% effectiveness, you know, just fairly good job, mask for the public fairly quickly
00:11:36.580
So, I think we'll see a big difference when we get masks.
00:11:38.860
In addition to the virus crisis itself, we're having a major irony crisis.
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I don't know if you're aware of it, because it kind of flies under the radar, but my nose
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itches like crazy when I'm on camera now, and it's literally just an itch.
00:12:00.060
Like, I know it's psychosomatic, because the moment the camera turns off, this stops, but
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Mexico is paying for the wall, you know, in the virtual sense that they're, they just
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moved their military up to guard the border so Americans can't get in.
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You know, this is just on my list of the irony crisis.
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It was announced today that Boris Johnson tested positive for coronavirus after quite publicly
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bragging that he went and shook hands with coronavirus victims in the hospital, and he
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There's some Instagram influencer type, I don't know how big she was, but it made a story in
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which she was bragging that she was not going to do social distancing.
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In the irony crisis further, we have some news that the southern part of the United States
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It's sort of a record heat for this time of year.
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The only thing that might save us from the coronavirus, and I'm not even joking, this
00:13:35.680
Because remember, with the coronavirus, it's not about finding the switch where you turn
00:13:41.080
It's about a whole bunch of different things that take a little bit of the edge off it
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and shrink and shrink and shrink it until the replication rate, you know, the R factor
00:13:54.580
So if one person gives it to two people, you've got a pandemic.
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But if one person only on average gives it to, you know, 0.8 of a person, well, then that's
00:14:07.680
So remember, we're just doing a whole bunch of little things to try to shrink that under
00:14:16.420
And I probably had some point I was going to make, but I forgot what it was.
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Your experience of time passing is just all weird now?
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I don't even know what day of the week it is half the time.
00:14:38.320
But I think it was yesterday when I tweeted that the press needs to tell us today, that
00:14:44.700
was when I tweeted it, who makes this hydroxychloroquine drug, the Trump pills, and where do the raw
00:15:03.720
I'd have to say I don't have the answers, but I have some information that will start
00:15:10.180
Number one, the source, the base source for these chloroquine and quinine drugs and malaria
00:15:18.260
drugs, and I don't know about hydroxychloroquine, but I think it might be derived also from a
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It's the cinchona tree, and it is grown primarily in the Andes mountain range.
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This stretches from on the west coast of South America, all the way from, let's say, start
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from the bottom, and the mountain range goes all, it's a tropical forest basically, mountains
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and tropical forest, all the way up to, oh, Venezuela.
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Yeah, according to my map, Venezuela, unconfirmed, but I'm just looking at the map and overlaying
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the country of Venezuela with the length of the tropical forest that has the base source
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Is it a coincidence that we just put a price on Maduro's head?
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You know, the United States just said $25 million to basically bring him in.
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And that's usually what we do before we kill a leader of another country, if we're being
00:16:36.280
By the time we put a $25 million bounty on him, and I think he's being accused of drug
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trafficking, by the time we do that, we've decided to kill him.
00:16:46.080
Now, we don't know when, we don't know how, we don't know what that looks like, but the
00:16:52.180
Now, I praise the president and his advisors for making this decision exactly when they
00:17:05.440
Because we, you know, under normal conditions, it would be a pretty risky proposition to take
00:17:11.280
out the leader of another country, no matter the conditions.
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If you heard today that Maduro got taken out, and let's say America was behind it, or even
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suspected to be behind it, if you heard that news today, how much would you care?
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It actually wouldn't even make it to your bottom level of stuff you're caring about this week.
00:17:41.740
Under any normal week, if everything was going fine, it would, of course, be the biggest
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It would, you know, might rip apart the fabric of America, really questioning our values.
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What are the unintended consequences of taking in a leader of another country?
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And it would be a B story, somewhere down in the column.
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And by the time we got through the crisis, literally nobody would care.
00:18:17.240
So, whoever in the administration decided that this was the week to basically tell the
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world we're going to kill the leader of another country, because that's what we did, it's really
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It's like it approaches genius-level strategy timing.
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If that's the outcome we wanted, my God, it's just breathtakingly perfect.
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What does it mean that Venezuela is in part of the zone that might be at least part of
00:19:00.340
the source that the entire world probably wants more of, this tree bark?
00:19:04.000
And I need a fact check on that, because I'm definitely into speculative territory here.
00:19:09.080
So, don't take anything I'm taking too seriously until you get some fact checks.
00:19:13.580
But, if Venezuela is also a source for this tree bark, and we know that the price of oil
00:19:20.840
collapsed, which is Venezuela's lifeblood, what would the, let's say, bad actor head of
00:19:30.820
Venezuela do if suddenly, by this accident of the crisis, they happened to be sitting on
00:19:37.080
a whole bunch of this tree bark that everyone in the world would pay any amount of money to
00:19:43.900
Again, depends if there are other ways to make it, which I'll talk about in a minute.
00:19:54.820
But, if Madura is even accused of hoarding that tree bark, or, you know, jacking up the
00:20:05.460
price, or selling it to people we don't like, you know, whatever.
00:20:08.500
However, if he's even slightly implicated, and, of course, he has been implicated in drug
00:20:13.380
dealing, but we don't know what the drug is, it's just a free punch.
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If you hear that Madura was doing something that might make the crisis worse, it's just
00:20:28.360
You know, he could go this week and you wouldn't care a bit.
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Here's the other way that you can apparently synthesize this hydroxychloroquine, the Trump
00:20:58.600
But somebody said coal tar could be the base for synthesizing it.
00:21:03.900
Now, my limited understanding is that you can, yeah, somebody's saying synthetic.
00:21:09.480
So the other thing you can do is make it synthetically.
00:21:12.020
My understanding is that the only reason you wouldn't make it synthetically is that it's
00:21:16.840
more expensive to do it that way than to just strip some bark and, you know, do it the
00:21:21.820
But at the moment, and during a crisis, of course, economics get turned upside down.
00:21:37.500
If you tripled it, most people are still going to pay it and be happy about it.
00:21:43.540
So what I don't have visibility on is how quickly are whoever's making this, American
00:21:50.540
companies or coordinating with offshore companies that are working, you know, for the American
00:21:57.680
But we have complete, complete lack of knowledge, the public does, about what that pipeline looks
00:22:06.580
Think about the fact that we're in a worldwide pandemic, and the news business can't tell
00:22:14.880
you if one of the most promising things that we have in our arsenal, this drug, if we have
00:22:21.940
enough of it, is there a risk we won't have enough of it?
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Does it, you know, do we have a raw supply problem?
00:22:36.820
Now, we don't need to know every detail, but wouldn't you like to know, is there enough?
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And the entire worldwide reporting structure, every country, every political leaning, every
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one of them, has given you no information, none, no information on the most, what could
00:22:58.640
be the most important question of all this, which is, is there a med that works?
00:23:08.700
If we don't have visibility on that, or I would settle for knowing that the news organizations
00:23:15.180
are trying as hard as they can to get that information, but it's hard, right?
00:23:20.420
If that's the case, then I'd say, all right, well, they're working on it.
00:23:24.660
But at this point, can't you determine that there is no such thing as a news business in
00:23:31.780
the sense that they'll go out and find stuff that you couldn't find out on your own?
00:23:36.340
At the moment, the news business is just pointing a camera at our politicians and listening to
00:23:49.260
I don't know if that was about me, but I'm going to block you anyway.
00:23:59.200
So Breitbart has been the, I think, shining star of the entire episode, you know, the crisis
00:24:06.320
so far that I think they've had the best reporting.
00:24:09.280
You know, your mileage might differ, but I feel like Breitbart has had the best reporting
00:24:20.140
So Jack Dorsey, head of Twitter, tweeted at the government that maybe we should be looking
00:24:31.720
This is, you know, one of Jack Dorsey's products.
00:24:34.900
It's an app that lets you sell, you know, move cryptocurrency around.
00:24:47.160
We should definitely be looking into it because there has to be some limitations to how easy
00:24:56.100
And then you've got tons of people who don't have checking accounts.
00:24:59.500
What do you do with the people you send a check to and they don't have checking accounts?
00:25:03.220
Well, I guess I can take you to a bank and try to get it cashed.
00:25:08.400
But it would certainly be cleaner and faster just to load up, you know, load up people's
00:25:15.060
Now, the hard part would be to know you didn't double count because you're still going to
00:25:19.640
You know, did you give somebody some cash that should have been a check?
00:25:23.440
So there might be some difficulties in that, but that's solidly in the category of things
00:25:29.500
that should have been, that should be looked at.
00:25:31.440
I don't think our government has the capability to analyze that.
00:25:39.180
So I think the government's going to act conservatively, and that's probably not going to be on their
00:25:43.240
short list of things they can deal with in an emergency.
00:25:46.820
It probably takes a little more considered thought.
00:25:49.960
But I also haven't heard Jack's explanation of it.
00:25:53.440
So if I hear more about that, I will pass it along.
00:25:55.780
So I would like to, speaking on that same topic, can you imagine being in this situation
00:26:06.740
Think about how much information you got from Twitter.
00:26:10.760
Think about how many lies from the World Health Organization, from your own government,
00:26:21.200
How many things were just ridiculously bad advice that you wouldn't have known it was bad advice
00:26:30.480
If you ask me, having this crisis without Twitter would be a disaster.
00:26:41.240
Twitter probably, and social media and the news business, is probably getting people pretty panicky.
00:26:48.600
And you'd have to say that's a cost that you wish you didn't have.
00:26:52.980
But I'll say it as many times as I have to say it.
00:27:00.320
What is it that makes you panic is different than what makes me panic.
00:27:03.040
You have to panic 10% of the people to near death to get the other 90% to do what they need to do
00:27:10.820
to save the people who are panicked to death from actually dying.
00:27:16.640
So if anybody has a better way to get the entire country to move in a productive way
00:27:22.800
than scaring the shit out of 10% of us, I've never heard of it.
00:27:30.300
So if you're complaining to the social media and the news,
00:27:33.040
is making people panic, it's a factual statement.
00:27:40.520
And they're probably ahead of the problem, meaning that the problems they're talking about
00:27:48.060
They're not even talking about what's happening at the moment as much.
00:27:51.320
And when they do, it's anecdotal and it makes you think things are worse than they are.
00:27:55.260
But, you know, Twitter as a tool to protect the world against some types of risks, I think, is proven.
00:28:06.520
I think Twitter has proven itself to be essentially the emergency brain of the universe.
00:28:14.080
Well, maybe not the universe, but at least our galaxy.
00:28:18.080
And what I mean by that is during good times, we aggregate, not aggregate,
00:28:23.500
during good times we separate into individual needs.
00:28:27.880
You know, I'm just fighting for what I want in my capitalist world.
00:28:31.140
You're fighting for what you want in your capitalist world.
00:28:34.140
And, you know, we got winners and losers, but overall it works.
00:28:38.780
But in an emergency, we immediately sort of grouped together
00:28:49.400
Now, I think that much of that will dissipate as things improve.
00:28:54.940
Because when things are good, you can just, you know,
00:28:57.640
retreat from the global brain into your individual brain,
00:29:03.060
And that system works well if we're all just pursuing our individual needs during good times.
00:29:10.260
But without Twitter, we could not have formed a global brain,
00:29:14.660
one that is far more powerful than all of the sum of the parts.
00:29:26.580
It's, you know, if there's some kind of award for the greatest asset,
00:29:36.300
you know, maybe it goes to ventilators and N95 masks and doctors and stuff.
00:29:42.860
The Henry Ford Health Center put out some guidelines about how to handle,
00:29:51.880
if you have too many people who are in a near-death situation, how do you handle that?
00:29:59.160
Now, most of the advice was just straight up, you know,
00:30:02.740
we've got to make some choices and unfortunately some will die.
00:30:06.700
So it's just basic triage, medical, ethical medical triage.
00:30:11.260
But then they stuck this sentence in there with all the good medical advice
00:30:15.580
that was pretty standard, even though it's scary.
00:30:19.680
Removing ventilator will not be based on race, gender, health insurance status,
00:30:26.060
sexual orientation, employment, or immigration status.
00:30:42.480
Did Henry Ford Health Center imagine that they have a doctor or a nurse
00:30:47.160
who would be standing in the room and say, you know,
00:30:53.260
I think I'll take this off and give it to a Nigerian or a Norwegian.
00:31:02.020
Is somebody going to say, you know, this person on the ventilator,
00:31:06.300
I've checked their citizenship and got to let you go.
00:31:21.460
But the most shocking thing I've seen so far is the idea that somebody thought
00:31:35.020
We're all alarmed that 3.28 million people filed for unemployment.
00:31:44.020
You've been told, my God, my God, 3.28 million people filed for unemployment.
00:31:55.000
Let's say each of the 3.28 million people who filed for unemployment,
00:32:03.740
Let's say you gave them all $2,000 per week, you know, tax-free.
00:32:08.060
They don't have to pay any taxes on just $2,000 a week.
00:32:10.360
That's $8,000 a month, which would be way above the average income, especially tax-free,
00:32:21.340
So this is just a thought experiment, not a suggestion.
00:32:25.440
So if you gave all $3.28 million $2,000 per week, you know, for $8,000 a month, what would
00:32:34.420
Well, it would cost about, I'm going to round, grossly round these numbers, but about $7 billion
00:32:39.600
per week, or $28 billion per month, and let's say we ran this for three months, $84 billion.
00:32:51.520
So for $84 billion out of a $2 trillion package, just $84 billion, big number, but it seems like
00:33:02.960
For $84 billion, you could pay every one of those unemployed people more money than most
00:33:09.900
of them have ever made in that three months, and you wouldn't even notice it.
00:33:15.820
You know, if the only thing we had going on today was, uh-oh, we suddenly need $84 billion
00:33:21.000
that we didn't know we needed, well, we wouldn't like it, but we'd barely notice it, right?
00:33:36.860
So let me delve into economics territory a little bit more deeply than I feel comfortable.
00:33:46.140
If there are any economists out there who have superior economic understanding than me, and
00:33:53.220
that would be most economists probably, uh, fact-check me on this.
00:33:58.580
So here are the things I think are right about this, uh, proposed $2 trillion legislation.
00:34:05.440
I believe that they plan to pay for it by printing money as opposed to borrowing.
00:34:14.440
That they're not going to borrow, which would raise everybody's debt, but rather they're going
00:34:23.340
Now, the way that works is if we have the same amount of goods, you know, everybody who's
00:34:28.340
selling stuff in the United States still has the same number of them, but you add a bunch
00:34:34.000
of dollars into the system, then there'll be more people with money compared to the same
00:34:41.940
And that could lead to inflation because people will say, hey, you know, um, I'll pay more for
00:34:47.160
that because there's more money and it just feels like it's free money because of inflation.
00:34:54.440
Inflation is a gigantic, you know, civilization ending problem if it gets too high.
00:35:10.640
Now I'm exaggerating for effect, but follow me on this.
00:35:13.240
If you're in a situation of a guaranteed recession, which we are for the next three months, it's
00:35:19.900
There's no question there's going to be a recession.
00:35:22.520
Just, you know, mathematically, it's guaranteed.
00:35:28.220
I'm not talking about, you know, masks and medical equipment, but who's going to be able
00:35:33.900
to raise their price for, you know, headphones for the next three months?
00:35:38.800
Now, who is selling these little stands that you put your phone in?
00:35:42.180
Can they raise their price in the next three months?
00:35:45.460
If anything, they're going to lower the prices to try to get rid of inventory.
00:35:49.200
So in a world which I don't think we've ever seen this before, this is just the weirdest
00:35:53.860
situation, in which inflation is zero or negative.
00:36:00.200
If the only problem of printing money is that it might hurt inflation and inflation is zero or
00:36:10.660
Or, and here's the part that I can't, I don't quite have the background to be able to think
00:36:17.240
Maybe you have to do, you know, complicated computer models.
00:36:21.180
So it could be that after you get past the three months, you'll wish you hadn't done it.
00:36:25.880
You know, once things get back to normal, maybe there's still too much cash floating around.
00:36:32.140
But check me on this, because I don't know if, I may be talking crazy talk.
00:36:41.640
They're printing money during a time of really no risk of inflation shouldn't be that big
00:36:55.620
I would like to give some credit to one of my disagreeing critics on Twitter.
00:37:03.260
Now, I've often said to you that, you know, this is sort of the loser think idea here.
00:37:11.180
And the idea is that if people disagree with me, usually it's because there's some identifiable
00:37:17.860
piece of loser think involved, that there's just some gap in their understanding of the
00:37:24.560
So, oh, the reason you're saying that is because you don't have a background in economics.
00:37:31.820
And the reason you think that is because you don't have a background in psychology or how
00:37:38.420
But when I see somebody who does actually understand how things work and does not engage
00:37:44.160
in loser think, and they disagree with me, I stop and say, okay, what am I doing wrong
00:37:52.060
So there's one of these situations, and I'm just going to put it out there, not as a right
00:37:57.100
or wrong, but just note it, because it disagrees with me, but it's rational.
00:38:08.480
And I don't know if you're watching, but this is Robert Barnes, attorney, and I would say
00:38:17.820
You know, there are people that you interact with so much on Twitter that you feel like
00:38:20.980
you know them personally, and you forget you haven't been in the same room.
00:38:24.920
But Robert Barnes, I know to be, have watched him for years talking about Trump-related stuff,
00:38:37.520
When he disagrees with me, I usually stop and say, uh-oh, what did I do this time?
00:38:45.560
I'm on the side that says that if we did nothing to aggressively address the pandemic,
00:38:52.500
that the death rate would be way higher than normal flu and, you know, crippling.
00:38:58.320
That if you just, if you sort of didn't treat it seriously, it wouldn't be like a seasonal flu.
00:39:05.220
But I also think that we're doing a heroic job in the United States, especially a heroic job of
00:39:14.620
assembling our human ingenuity and resources and changing everything from the way we think
00:39:23.600
So my prediction is that we will also have a low death rate.
00:39:34.300
So I haven't seen other people's predictions, but I'm going to make a prediction that the
00:39:39.380
total U.S. death count will stay under 5,000, which would be less than the common flu, but
00:39:45.940
only because we're working on this one so hard.
00:39:49.360
So I'm optimistic that the death rate, even though the infection rate and the sickness
00:39:53.760
rate will zoom, that we'll find a way to keep the death rate from climbing.
00:40:00.620
Could be right, could be wrong, because it's a prediction, right?
00:40:09.860
And we know that I've agreed with the worst-case doom predictors under the assumption that you
00:40:18.660
So I've agreed with the doom people if you don't do anything.
00:40:22.120
Robert Barnes, and I hope I can characterize his argument accurately, because the parts that
00:40:28.040
I understand, I think I understand it, are logical.
00:40:34.660
Where are the hospitals that are over capacity?
00:40:40.640
And I thought, and I responded to him, my God, are you watching a different news than I am?
00:40:49.580
How could you not see just multiple reports of hospitals that are being slammed, and bodies
00:40:56.860
are being put in refrigerated trucks, and nurses are panicked, and that is supplies, and they're
00:41:06.460
So I'm hearing all these things, and then Dan Robert Barnes, sort of, I forget the exact
00:41:15.560
exchange, but he kind of challenged me to show my sources.
00:41:23.020
I was just mad, because I thought to myself, my God, am I your Google?
00:41:31.220
So I asked people, you know, I tweeted, and said, well, I'll just settle this.
00:41:34.960
I'll just tweet it, put your, you know, reports in the comments of all the places that are
00:41:41.560
already, just already becoming, you know, like morgues and, you know, deathly hellscapes.
00:41:49.820
And I thought, well, Robert Barnes is going to see all of these comments, all the reports
00:41:54.040
and the stories, tweeted at him, showing that there are hospitals that are just being absolutely
00:42:07.080
What I thought would happen is all of these rock-solid reports of credible things that
00:42:14.820
Instead, there were a lot of reports that all had the same quality.
00:42:21.680
So, for example, what does it mean that the 13 people died in one day in a major hospital
00:42:39.260
Well, if it's part of a tapestry of other bad things, and they're all confirmed, then
00:42:45.800
It's part of the tapestry of all the other things that are similar in other hospitals,
00:42:49.320
and, yeah, clearly this is part of the picture.
00:42:52.260
But you've got to ask yourself, have 13 elderly people ever died in a major hospital on one
00:43:05.520
Or, and let me ask it another way, do we know that this hospital was not a magnet hospital?
00:43:13.040
In other words, and this is just speculating, I'm just saying all the things we don't know.
00:43:16.720
I'm not saying what happened, because I don't know.
00:43:18.400
I'm just saying all the things we don't know are a lot.
00:43:21.700
For example, if you were in New York City and somebody was suspected of having this flu,
00:43:28.460
the COVID, would they go to whatever is the nearest hospital?
00:43:32.720
Or would they quite rationally say, let's take them to the best hospital that still has
00:43:37.140
capacity, because they're the best ones for dealing with a specific problem?
00:43:42.160
Could you imagine, and this is a question, not a statement, could you imagine that the reason
00:43:47.240
13 people died in the same hospital on the same day is that the bad cases were specifically
00:43:54.840
Could you imagine that if this were seasonal flu, everybody would just go to the closest
00:43:59.880
Well, 13 of them might have died anyway, but you wouldn't notice, because they were distributed.
00:44:05.560
Now, I don't know if anything like that happened.
00:44:08.020
I'm just saying that if I'm going to take, here I'm being devil's advocate to my own argument.
00:44:13.220
I'm going to take Robert Barham's point of view and say, does it hold up?
00:44:21.320
It held up, not in the sense that I know what's going on there.
00:44:24.960
It held up in the sense that I don't know what's going on there.
00:44:28.260
So that's not confirmed to be evidence of anything.
00:44:37.180
Robert Barnes, I also said, you know, we've never seen hospitals being pushed as hard as
00:44:44.140
they are, that we're already, I said, we're already over capacity at hospitals.
00:44:50.700
So the question, so the, you know, the debate is over, right?
00:44:59.200
To which Robert Barnes responds with an article with Source showing that in 2018, hospitals
00:45:06.380
were building tents and emergency expanding just for the regular flu.
00:45:14.840
And now I say to myself, okay, so that does look a lot like this.
00:45:31.340
If I'm going to be honest, that's a fair point.
00:45:33.860
So we can't tell by looking at it today, because there are a little bit too much of the special
00:45:42.380
And we also know that, I don't know, 99% of hospitals, based on lots of anecdotal reports
00:45:47.780
I got yesterday, most hospitals don't yet have a crisis.
00:45:52.200
And they've cleared their schedules and got rid of their, the unnecessary or the elective
00:45:57.860
So most hospitals are just twiddling their thumbs and trying to make sure that they're
00:46:10.320
And then also pointed out that China, South Korea, and Japan seem to have bent their curves,
00:46:23.460
I don't know if we have good enough visibility about why.
00:46:34.140
You know, maybe there's not as much kissing on the cheek in Japan, because there isn't.
00:46:38.760
It could be that there's simply more compliance.
00:46:44.360
You know, maybe Americans are just, it could be that Americans are just going to say, screw
00:46:51.720
I'm going to, I'm going to go to the concert anyway.
00:46:53.620
That would be a very American thing to do and not in a good way.
00:46:57.280
Whereas in Japan, you know, if we learn anything from the end of World War II, it looks like
00:47:02.960
the population in Japan is very, you know, leader friendly, meaning when the leader tells
00:47:16.360
And in China, maybe we have questions about the actual data.
00:47:21.500
Robert Barnes, your, your movie exists intact, meaning that your, your view of the world,
00:47:29.720
your filter on the world cannot at this point, you know, today with what we know, that movie
00:47:41.000
And I will, let me just say as clearly as possible, I agree with you that your hypothesis
00:47:47.740
that this is all overblown and wouldn't have been much more than the regular flu is still
00:47:57.320
And the reason I disagree with it completely is that the people who have been most right
00:48:03.640
still say, okay, if we didn't do a lot to stop this, we're still going to be in trouble.
00:48:09.080
So I'm still, I'm still biased toward the experts and biased toward the people who have predicted
00:48:18.940
I think we should act as though he's wrong to get a better result.
00:48:33.460
When it's all over, if what happens in the end is not many people died, we will argue
00:48:39.720
forever if it was because we did such a good job or it was because it was a mass hysteria
00:48:47.440
and it was never that big a problem in the first place.
00:48:55.100
There's big news about Representative Thomas Massey, Kentucky.
00:48:59.820
Apparently, he is the one holdout against a voice vote.
00:49:06.020
Now, I don't know too much about the rules of the House, but this is what I think is right.
00:49:11.080
That the House can call for a unanimous consent, meaning to get to yes without an actual vote
00:49:21.320
Now, you would do that in a situation where you don't expect disagreement and you don't
00:49:28.120
need to take the time to do the vote and you don't need to get on record about who is for
00:49:33.200
So even the people who would want to vote against something, if they know they're going to lose,
00:49:38.500
sometimes for unity and also to hide their vote, they might say, well, let's just agree
00:49:45.380
It looks like it only takes one person to ruin that plan and that one person has emerged.
00:49:51.740
So Representative Massey from Kentucky is concerned about the legislation having pork and unnecessary
00:50:01.180
things and also calculated on Twitter that it would cost $17,000 per person in debt.
00:50:13.680
You know, I keep telling you that my experience is just absolutely bizarre because the entire
00:50:20.540
size of the planet, for just my personal experience, has just shrunk.
00:50:25.840
And it feels like if somebody's in the news, I can just talk to them.
00:50:30.780
You know, somebody will be headline news today and I'll just say, huh, I think I'll send them
00:50:34.420
a message and then I'll get a message back from the person who's the most important person
00:50:40.580
Did I just send a message to the most important person in the world and I got a reply in, you
00:50:52.200
Your ability to connect to your government representatives is amazing right now.
00:50:59.760
I mean, we'll never be able to completely, you know, know what difference that made and
00:51:11.100
But at the moment, you can really get a hold of people in a crazy way.
00:51:15.440
So, to round out my story, Twitter suggests people to follow.
00:51:21.240
And I happened to notice that Representative Massey was suggested as somebody to follow,
00:51:26.480
probably because I was reading the hashtags about him.
00:51:29.520
And I looked over and I noticed that he follows me on Twitter.
00:51:32.960
So, I thought, well, what happens if I follow him back?
00:51:38.460
I'll just send him a DM, give him my opinion, see what happens.
00:51:43.880
So, this morning, I followed him on Twitter, you know, while I'm reading the headlines about him.
00:51:52.180
He got back to me in, I don't know, 15 minutes.
00:51:55.160
In 15 minutes, the most important person for this story in the country right now,
00:52:02.280
for the biggest factor in the world right now is this bill.
00:52:06.760
The person who's the most important person on it got back to me on Twitter in 20 minutes.
00:52:15.660
That doesn't mean you agree with them, disagree with them, doesn't mean the government does everything right.
00:52:19.840
But man, when your citizens can get to somebody in 20 minutes in the middle of a crisis
00:52:24.140
and get a legitimate personal response, we're doing something very, very right.
00:52:30.100
And again, credit to Jack Dorsey and the founders of Twitter for making this even possible.
00:52:40.000
I said, Representative Massey, the entire country agrees with you that the relief legislation is flawed.
00:52:48.560
Don't you think Republicans and Democrats all agree that this thing is flawed?
00:52:53.480
And I said, but given the psychology of the country, we need fast action on a flawed plan
00:53:02.780
So, I don't disagree one bit with his disagreements.
00:53:07.160
I only weigh the priorities different, that we need fast action for the psychology of the country
00:53:13.980
as well as the pocketbook of the country, even if it's not perfect.
00:53:21.660
My limited understanding is that we are printing money for this, not borrowing.
00:53:26.060
So, remember, he did the calculation of $17,000 per person we would owe.
00:53:31.920
So, I said, we're printing money, not borrowing.
00:53:35.220
And when inflation is this low, and the current downturn makes it impossible to raise prices on most goods,
00:53:42.660
that printed money is closer to free because it won't cause inflation.
00:53:47.520
It's the only time in the world that would ever be true.
00:53:50.760
I can't think of any other time you could print that much money and still be sure it wouldn't necessarily cause inflation in the short run, anyway.
00:53:59.100
And so, he responded back to me, said he's been following me for a while, and apparently he watches these periscopes.
00:54:06.040
So, Representative Massey, if you are watching this, a lot of respect for you, for your opinion,
00:54:13.060
and a lot of respect for you for getting back to a member of the citizens who had a genuine concern.
00:54:22.720
And he got back to me, and he said he appreciated my perspective and thanked me for reaching out.
00:54:29.980
You know, nobody's asking their government officials to change their mind on the spot, make a new decision.
00:54:36.100
You know, nobody's going to ask him to change his mind just because he got a DM.
00:54:47.920
And I can't say enough about how encouraging this is about human beings
00:54:53.900
and who we are and how we're going to act in a crisis, right?
00:54:58.280
So, we've got lots of bad examples, but every once in a while you get a good example.
00:55:05.460
I would like to see you get past this in whatever way maintains your principles.
00:55:18.240
So, it looks like the government is preparing some kind of a geographic-based plan for taking people back to work.
00:55:31.660
And I'll say this is short of an opinion because I still have a little gap in my thinking.
00:55:42.460
One plan is to say, okay, this county hasn't had much problems.
00:55:45.780
And, yeah, I know that people can drive in and out of the county, so they might have some problems if they open up.
00:55:52.360
But we're going to open it by geography and then, you know, play it by ear.
00:55:56.020
I suppose you could close them back up if you've got a problem.
00:56:00.480
And it has the advantage of simplicity, so it's got that.
00:56:06.660
But let's compare it to an alternative plan that I'm going to describe right now.
00:56:12.320
Instead of making it a geographic decision, could you not make it individual?
00:56:17.360
And could you not make a simple checklist which you ask people to adhere to, knowing that not everybody will?
00:56:28.040
Not everybody is going to adhere to even a law, much less a guideline.
00:56:41.340
And if we find that you are at low genetic risk, and I think we can determine that.
00:56:46.960
That's an unknown, but highly, highly likely that we could start testing people who had a bad outcome,
00:56:54.980
test people who had a good outcome, and I think we'd find a reason in their genes.
00:57:04.440
Let's say that we find out what the correlation is, but you've also, let's say you've got a 23andMe,
00:57:12.060
and you can just download your data, bounce it against it, and find out what your risk is.
00:57:16.720
I don't know if that'll work, but there's a good indication it might.
00:57:22.940
So, suppose you could say, all right, all right, no matter what geography you're in,
00:57:26.640
if you've gone through this process of actually testing your DNA against, you know, the known risky DNA,
00:57:34.360
and you look low risk, maybe you could go back to work even if you're in New York City.
00:57:42.400
Somebody who knows these risks better would have to talk to it, but I'm giving you a framework for a decision based on individuals.
00:57:50.000
The other thing is you could just say, you know, the moment you have enough of this hydroxychloroquine
00:57:55.400
so that the doctor can hand them out like M&Ms to anybody who has a sniffle.
00:58:02.400
Could we not say then, if you have a subscript, if you're in a place that has good supply,
00:58:10.100
so let's say we know New York City has a good supply of this drug.
00:58:17.360
But you could say, well, if you're young and you have access to it, you're in a place that isn't in shortage,
00:58:25.440
you could go back to work because the worst case is you get it.
00:58:29.240
You've got to keep yourself out of it, away from other people for a while.
00:58:36.900
There are some jobs that are physical separation all over the place by their nature.
00:58:40.980
If you're a truck driver and the only contact you have is on both ends of the pickup and the drop-off,
00:58:48.780
how hard would it be to modify the pick-off and drop-off so that it's not a risk?
00:58:55.140
You know, just people stay away or it's just one guy on a truck lift and when he's doing his work,
00:59:03.240
Wouldn't there be lots of jobs where you would be willing to certify
00:59:07.560
that you're not going to be within six feet of anybody?
00:59:12.380
Could that not be, at least on a voluntary basis, a criteria?
00:59:20.220
And maybe it could also be based on availability of gloves and masks.
00:59:24.180
Suppose you say, I'm 25 years old, I have an N95 mask, it's two weeks from now.
00:59:30.520
You know, we don't have enough of them now, but let's say it's two weeks from now.
00:59:36.660
I'm a certain age, I'm healthy, no underlying conditions that I know of.
00:59:40.140
And I've got a job where I'm not going to be within six feet of people.
00:59:57.340
I don't know why, but I'm sure you had a reason.
00:59:59.620
So, these are just a sample of ways that we could decide if an individual is.
01:00:08.680
Now, would people who do not meet these criteria say, well, I need a paycheck, so even though
01:00:15.320
I don't quite meet these criteria, I'm going to go out there because lots of people are going
01:00:19.260
to work and maybe nobody will notice, and would that happen?
01:00:24.180
But remember, you're not trying to get the infection down to zero.
01:00:31.220
But the immediate goal is to get the infection rate of spread below one.
01:00:45.680
So, I think that some amount of social pressure, whistleblowing, and maybe the police tapping
01:00:56.260
you on the shoulder, if it's obvious you're congregating and violating, there may be enough
01:01:01.460
social pressure and, you know, government tapping you on the back that could reduce the
01:01:08.480
number of people who are just being stupid and violating the guidelines, probably to a lower
01:01:12.440
I mean, look at what happened when they said close everything.
01:01:16.340
When the government said just close everything that's non-essential, it worked, right?
01:01:22.060
It didn't happen on day one, but didn't it work?
01:01:25.300
I don't think there's a restaurant that's open in an area where they're supposed to not
01:01:33.380
So, I think that's a mistake if the only thing they do is by geography.
01:01:38.380
It should be geography, but also individual risk.
01:01:41.820
I don't know that we have enough masks, genetic tests, home tests for easy tests.
01:01:52.000
So, we may not have enough assets to judge on an individual basis yet.
01:01:57.060
So, that might be phase two, but wouldn't you like to hear that a phase two is coming?
01:02:01.460
Like, I'd like to hear Dr. Burke say, the best we can do in our current situation is there's
01:02:12.520
That would be cool for the first thing they tell us.
01:02:15.680
But I'd like to hear very, very soon after that, we don't know yet, but what we're working
01:02:22.380
on is some kind of a deal where if you meet this checklist, you two individually can go
01:02:28.000
to work in some cases, no matter where you are.
01:02:32.700
So, that's what I want to see for my government.
01:02:46.440
Just make sure I talked about everything I want to do.
01:02:52.320
I'll try to come back at the same time in the PM for a simultaneous swaddle in a nice
01:03:00.580
Everything's going in the right direction, even if it doesn't look like it.