Episode 884 Scott Adams: Taking Questions and Solving Pandemics Like it's Nothing
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Summary
In this episode of Swaddling in a Warm Blanket with Scott, we talk about what's new and exciting in the world of public opinion, and why you should trust non-experts when it comes to certain things.
Transcript
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum
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Hey everybody, come on in here. It's time for Swaddling in a Warm Blanket with Scott.
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He came to the right place if that's what you wanted to do. It's all going to happen here.
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I've been taking questions on Twitter, meaning I tweeted to tell people to ask me questions.
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And I will be answering these questions. But first, let me give you an idea of what's new and exciting.
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Number one, people are starting to wise up to the fact that masks might be a good idea after all.
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So it's sort of a crazy, bizarre thing watching our experts slowly start to agree with the public.
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It's supposed to work the other way around, right?
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Aren't the experts supposed to have a position and then the ignorant public eventually learns what the experts teach them?
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Well, that would be great, except we just did it the opposite way, where all the non-experts, when they heard that masks don't help you, but they do help professionals, but they don't help you.
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Half of the world who's not an expert said, well, I'm no expert.
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I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure masks help a little, and of course the non-experts were right.
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But that doesn't mean you should always listen to non-experts, just because in this obvious example they were right.
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For example, one of the most promising treatments apparently is this hydroxychloroquine.
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And if you would listen to the experts, they would have told you, don't get so excited about this.
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But if you'd listen to the non-experts, let's say Trump himself or me or many people on Twitter, they had been saying hydroxychloroquine is great.
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So we might find out again whether or not the experts were right, downplay it a little bit, or the people who don't know anything about anything were right.
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I mean, you can't make some kind of a big general statement just because it might be that ignorant people were right about two things that experts were wrong about.
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Because if there's one thing you can count on, it's that experts are good at projections and making models.
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If you've been watching me for a while, you know I can't stop talking about how accurate complicated projection models are.
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People we don't know do things we don't understand, and then they produce graphs.
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These graphs are made by experts, and we should trust them.
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But when we saw the graphs, there was one, well, just a small quibble that I have.
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It's not like I'm some epidemiologist, because I'm not.
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But when I listened to the experts talk about their own graphs, one of the little tidbits that Dr. Birx threw in there was that when they were calculating what the curve could be without any abatement,
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you know, the steep one where, you know, two million people might die.
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And then they compare it to the lower curve, where if you do everything right, you know, you really work hard and do everything right,
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you might be able to get it down to 100,000, 200,000 people dead.
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And then the good doctor threw in this little tidbit, that at first I thought I heard it wrong.
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And she said, but of course, these numbers treat New York in the average.
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So New York, which is completely different than anything that's happening anywhere in the country, you know, there are a few other hot spots that have their problems.
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But New York is, what, half of all the problem?
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What kind of an average do you get when you take a whole big country that mostly doesn't have too many problems but a few little warm spots?
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And then you throw in this one data point that's as big as all of the other data points, and it's just one city.
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That's the most worthless number you could ever have.
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I believe she said that directly, criticizing their own graph.
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She wanted us to know, quite reasonably, wanted us to know that New York was in the average.
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Now, if you don't, you know, if you're not, let's say, conversant with modeling and math and spreadsheets and stuff,
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But what would have been far more, let's say, clear would be one model that's just for New York
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and then another model that maybe is everything else because everything else is so different from New York.
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And then that everything else, I think, would look a lot lower than their lowest curve.
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And then New York, if we try hard and put, you know, super resources into it, well, maybe we can get that down as well.
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I was listening to it today while I was walking instead of watching it.
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And somebody, I'd heard somebody say that she has a Valley Girl up talk, and I'd never noticed it before.
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And I think that when you watch her live, you don't hear it the same way.
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But if you hear, if you just listen to her, she has a voice that does not suggest scientific excellence.
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And, you know, somebody's going to say, oh, I'm being sexist, but it has nothing to do with that.
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You know, you could put a man into the same situation and be exactly the same comment.
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It's just there's a certain style of talking that sounds authoritative, male or female.
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So, but her voice, her voice maybe could be a little bit, a little bit more professional sounding.
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But anyway, that was to whoever said she sounds credible.
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Yes, she does in terms, she sounds credible in terms of expertise, of course.
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I'm still going to bet that the number of deaths are lower than their lowest estimate.
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And that if you net out the people who didn't die because we shut everything down, which is going to be in the tens of thousands.
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Probably tens of thousands of people won't die in car accidents, won't drown in pools.
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Well, I don't know about pools, but a whole range of things, they won't be getting killed at.
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Gross deaths might exceed that, but net, I'll say 5,000.
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Now, you should not take my estimate to be likely, because what do I know?
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I'm just the guy who's been right about, okay, everything so far.
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All right, so, is it my imagination, or are people definitely being nicer?
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President Trump seems to be modeling a little bit of nicer behavior.
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He did an extended interactions with Jim Acosta, which was not ideal.
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But, you could easily imagine it would have been worse.
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So, just watching the president calling Jim Acosta Jim, you know, he just used his first name a few times.
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And he did allow him to ask his questions, and he pushed back.
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But it was all way more polite than you're used to.
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Likewise, when we found out that, unfortunately, Chris Cuomo tested positive for the virus,
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I didn't see anybody acting political or like a jerk.
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I'm sure there were some, because it's the internet.
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But mostly people were just saying, you know, get well soon.
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All right, somebody says, only 5,000, we're already at 4,000.
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No, listen to me carefully, because when you come back and tell me I'm wrong, this is the key point.
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So, at this moment, of course, this will change.
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But at this moment, more people have been saved than have died.
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Meaning that people would have died in car accidents if we'd been driving to work, etc.
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I'm not saying that will last, but that's where we are.
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Everybody's going to misremember what I said and then come back to tell me I'm wrong.
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Isn't it bad enough that I'm probably going to be wrong by 100,000, according to the experts?
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That, in theory, I should be wrong by like 100,000, at least.
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If you're coming back, this doesn't bother the heck out of me.
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If somebody comes back and says, you said, and it wasn't what I said, I know that's going to happen.
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I got some questions here, which I will answer.
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Jen Texter says, do you think Trump now needs a behavioral psychologist on his panel to get us through the anxiety and stress?
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I have to admit, I'm losing a little bit of confidence in the experts, but I think we're in the right path, actually.
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I cannot take the press and the hatred and snark anymore.
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Well, honestly, it looks like there's less than ever compared to our normal.
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I mean, normally they're trying to impeach the president.
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And today they're just wondering if he did the right thing as soon as he could have.
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It wasn't long ago they were saying he should be kicked out of office and impeached and he was a tool of Russia.
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What they're criticizing him today for is, well, you know, he maybe eats up a little too much camera time communicating with the public.
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You know, if you look at the nature of the complaints this week, they're very small.
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They're kind of numerous because they need to fill up, you know, fill up the page and stuff.
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And nobody did the right thing faster than any other country.
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But hypothetically, had he known what he didn't know, he could have done it sooner.
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Those are the kinds of complaints that people are making.
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David Angel says, what makes the virus models any better than the climate change models?
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The further out you go in time and the more variables you have, the worse your model, as a general rule.
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They're actually like weeks compared to the climate models that are, you know, decades, 80 years, 100 years.
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And I would think that the virus model has far fewer variables, I think, right?
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I mean, I haven't looked at it in that level, but you'd think a virus model, they're just going to say, I don't know, six variables.
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Whereas the climate seems more like infinite variables.
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So I'm not saying the virus models are correct.
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But I do think, you know, the experts in Trump and Fauci, they had the worst time trying to explain to the public this simple concept.
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And it was making me crazy because they kept repeating it over and over.
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And you're probably already sick of it, which is that the models don't tell you what's going to happen.
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Now, because I've done lots of financial modeling, you know, I'm automatically on that page.
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The model, the prediction doesn't tell you what's going to happen.
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It's going to tell you sort of directionally where things will go.
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And, you know, if you make this kind of change, you'll sort of generally go that way.
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So the models are doing their job of scaring people to, you know, to comply.
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But I wouldn't look for accuracy, even in the short term.
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Somebody said something like, there's a famous quote, like,
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no predictions are accurate, but all predictions are useful.
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I would think that all the activity is going to be concentrated in a few hospitals.
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What would you think, without knowing anything,
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if we just had to guess how many beds, let's say that means patients,
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But if, let's say, you were taking the average of these COVID-19 patients,
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you know, and you averaged in X number need ventilation, X number don't.
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How many could one doctor handle, let's say, you know, in any given day during an emergency?
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Because, remember, they're working long hours and they're really hitting it.
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I thought the beginning of the briefing was very strong.
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And Trump's part in particular, he did very well.
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I thought it went too long and maybe he took too many questions.
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And that it seemed to, oh, look at all the estimates for how many patients a doctor can handle.
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All right, so, I think the president probably should have kept that as shorter, but it was generally good.
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Let me tell you what they are still failing at completely.
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So, the members of the press, they're so weak compared to the government now.
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I don't know if that's just because of the era of Trump or whatever.
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But they're asking all these questions of the administration, and the administration is just not answering them.
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And it goes like this, this form of the question.
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How many ventilators do you think we'll need, and how many do we have?
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Now, you could ask that same question again for masks.
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You know, I mean, you could add a little detail, but that's basically it, right?
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And for each of the different components, the hydroxychloroquine.
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And the reporters keep trying to ask that question in all kinds of forms.
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And even one of them was smart enough to say, shouldn't there be somebody whose job it is just to be measuring that stuff so that everybody knows what we have and what we need and report it out?
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Which is, of course, exactly what I've been saying for a while.
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Now, Mike Pence's answer is that we have that person.
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Works for FEMA, yes, you know, we have exactly that person.
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Because it doesn't look like you have that person.
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If you had that person, when they asked that question, you would have an answer.
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And even if the answer was approximate, for example, you might say some people think we'll need as many as 60,000 ventilators.
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And then you go on to say, we know that we have, let's say, 20,000 ventilators.
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If you added up all the people who are trying to make them and promising, we don't know if they'll meet their commitments.
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But if you just added what they're promising, we should be up to 45,000 within three weeks.
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Again, you could be way off, but it's more than we know now.
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I mean, it would at least, let's say the numbers were something like that.
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We've got 20,000 in the warehouses and commitments for another 25,000.
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You don't think anybody could have pulled those numbers together and just told us?
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Now, it could be that they're lying to us, the way they lied to us about the masks, the way they lied to us about the hydroxychloroquine.
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So maybe they're still just intentionally not telling us.
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But I would say this is just a gigantic, glaring flaw that the press is totally letting them get away with.
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And I don't know if the press just doesn't know that it should be reasonably easy to do.
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It's a big mystery why they're not pushing on that.
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But, you know, I've been giving it a little time because Pence did say that they are querying the hospitals to get exactly this kind of information.
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You know, if it's like everything else in the world, you can't do it overnight.
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And I'd like to see at least, I don't know, one number.
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I don't have confidence if I'm not seeing those numbers produced pretty quickly.
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Ian says, will anything ever be done about the obvious corruption of the World Health Organization?
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But I'd certainly be amazed if we continue to fund them, wouldn't you?
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I mean, maybe they do some things that are so important that we have to anyway.
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But after this situation where the World Health Organization seems to have been completely a bad actor,
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They were actually a bad actor and may have caused a lot of deaths.
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So I don't know how we would continue to fund them.
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What percent are you, so this is what percent uncertainty, I guess, masked fox on threats,
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that we'll see some sort of attack by a foreign country while we deal with the COVID-19 here at home?
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The odds that a foreign country would attack us under these circumstances are none.
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Because, first of all, who attacks the United States, right?
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You know, who would intentionally ever attack the United States?
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When was the last time somebody who had a standing army, let's say, not terrorists,
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but somebody you could find, like with a real government attack in the United States?
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But I will tell you this generic thing, which is diversification is good.
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And I personally have my money in, you know, the bulk of it in a Fortune 500 fund,
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you know, just an unmanaged fund of American companies.
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So that way I don't have to pick winners and losers.
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And I would think that in our current situation,
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we're probably going to get through this better than anybody else.
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So if you had to put your money in a country, it's still kind of America.
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It's still America, even as big as the budget deficit is and everything else.
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with an electronic certificate identifying antibodies in order to travel?
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There are lots of things that I would do in an emergency situation
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But yeah, if I had to basically be tagged as somebody who had recovered so I could travel,
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I mean, it would just be for my own benefit that I would have this extra power that I could travel.
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Tell us about the pranks you alluded to in your book.
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But in my first long-term relationship many years ago,
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I think she used them to, I don't know, take off makeup or something,
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So she'd have a bag that she would buy with a big old bunch of cotton balls.
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Now, the thing about cotton balls is that when you take one out of the bag,
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You could actually take quite a few cotton balls out
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before you could convince yourself that any have even left the bag.
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I don't know, they're expanding or whatever it is.
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it seems like you can't even tell the difference.
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I went to the store and I bought my own bag of cotton balls.
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and I would take two cotton balls out of my bag
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I've been stuck in the same project for two days.