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00:04:41.560I think it's a real good idea to listen to your government and take their advice, if you assume that they have your best interest, and they do,
00:05:39.660You know, I'm willing to put up with a little bit of fog of war early on in a problem.
00:05:45.900But as of today, do you think that Mike Pence should not be able to tell you how many tests we have, who has them, how many are in the pipeline, and how many do we really need before we have whatever we decide is enough to get back to work?
00:06:04.120Do you think we'll have any information like that today?
00:06:07.980I'm going to predict, and I know I'm going out on a limb here, I'm going to predict that we will not hear the most important piece of data in the world, right?
00:06:21.460The most important piece of data in the world, period.
00:06:27.120Most important data in the world is probably not that hard to get, at least in estimate form.
00:06:33.960The government surely knows who makes the test kits by now.
00:07:11.060It would be a child's view that your government is going to do everything right and also do it as soon as it could be done and better than all the other governments in a brand new emergency that nobody's seen before and nobody really had the right information.
00:07:29.040On April 20th, many weeks into this, knowing that having enough test kits is really going to be the whole game, right?
00:07:40.320Because you can't really do anything else without that base information.
00:07:46.200And we don't even have the base information of whether the kits are available or in what quantities.
00:07:52.440So let me give my government a failing grade, F.
00:07:58.200That's not to say they haven't done a bunch of things correctly.
00:08:01.600I'm strongly in the camp of agreeing with Trump that closing down travel from at least Wuhan early was a very strong sign that this is a big deal.
00:08:13.040There's no way you can interpret an unprecedented closing of air traffic from a major superpower.
00:08:22.940You can't interpret that as he didn't think it was important.
00:08:27.580There's no way you can go back in time and say he closed travel from China without thinking that there was a big emergency.
00:09:00.100You know, he did what needed to be done there.
00:09:03.320Now, lots of people are saying, and I think this is a fair criticism of the government, just of the government in general, that we didn't have the ability to quickly ramp up testing.
00:09:16.340I don't think it's a criticism that we didn't have a test for a virus that didn't exist yet.
00:09:33.840So you'd have to say that one major part of the Trump administration's responsibility, which is to have a reasonable plan for a pandemic, that doesn't mean having enough test kits.
00:09:48.300That means having a plan for quickly having enough, you know, which is different.
00:09:54.240And I think it's fair to say we didn't have that, right?
00:09:57.260Have you heard anybody say that we had any kind of a plan for quickly ramping up testing?
00:10:02.380If we didn't, then I would say the government is in complete failure on that topic.
00:10:09.280Now, do you say that that is therefore President Trump's failure?
00:10:16.220So yes, yes, in the sense that everything is the boss's problem.
00:10:21.180But if we dig down a level, do you think that there was ever a meeting in which somebody in the CDC said to President Trump,
00:10:29.920you know, the only way we can really be ready in case of a pandemic, and by the way, these pandemics are almost guaranteed.
00:10:39.020It's not like we even have to worry if we'll have one.
00:10:41.600So pretty much guaranteed, do we have, you know, would you like to fund the preparations to be able to quickly ramp up testing should we have a pandemic?
00:10:53.920Do you think that conversation ever happened?
00:10:56.060And do you think the president said, no, no, I don't think that's worth any money.
00:11:03.300So if we could be adults for a moment, it's very unlikely that President Trump ever even was presented with a decision about how to prepare the country in case of there was a pandemic.
00:11:15.620I'll bet he never even had that meeting.
00:11:17.740Now, you could argue that he should have called that meeting.
00:11:21.440And I think that would be a fair point.
00:11:28.200I will go further and say that if we don't hear more about testing in the end today, really, because there's no reason not to hear it today.
00:11:38.660I mean, even if Pence came out and said, I know how important it is to give you visibility on testing.
00:11:43.880You know, we're about 80 percent of the way to adding, adding it up and giving it to you.
00:11:53.180That would show that they have some sense of how important that is to be not only important.
00:11:58.580They know it's important, but important to communicate it.
00:12:02.940If you're if we're in the midst of a pandemic and there's protests in the street and we don't know exactly when we can reopen the economy.
00:12:12.480And I've said this before, that if we don't have at least a target date for each area that they can rely on, as opposed to a if you meet these conditions, you can go back to work.
00:12:26.920If you meet these conditions comes with a condition of its own.
00:12:31.560You have to have test kits that you don't have.
00:12:34.680So the government has created a situation and presented it to the public like this.
00:12:40.540Here are the guidelines to get back to work.
00:12:43.900By the way, it's not possible to achieve them.
00:13:10.200So if your government is just telling you that, hey, you can go back to work as soon as you complete this checklist, what's on the checklist?
00:13:17.420Well, one thing that might be impossible.
00:13:19.380We don't know if it will ever be solved before the economy totally crashes.
00:13:45.040But if Trump loses the election because he won't tell us basic information, remember, they wouldn't tell us about the ventilators, but he got lucky.
00:13:55.820It turns out it didn't matter because we made so many, it didn't matter.
00:13:58.860But that was a complete failure of management that we, the public, didn't have visibility on that.
00:14:05.580And now we're in another complete failure.
00:14:07.520We don't know how much hydroxychloroquine there is, or really even if it makes a difference for sure.
00:14:14.420And we don't know anything about tests.
00:14:22.400So I would say the government is in complete failure, federal government, as of today, easy to fix, could be completely fixed by this afternoon.
00:14:32.180So when I say it's in complete failure, I don't mean it's over.
00:14:35.840I mean if they don't fix this really fast while there are protests in the street, largely because of this lack of visibility, I would argue.
00:15:38.740I guess it's just because of coronavirus stuff and everybody.
00:15:42.820I think doctors are probably more interested today in what the non-doctor community is thinking about this than ever before.
00:15:51.640Because the doctors' fates depend almost, I mean to a huge degree, the fate of the doctors depends on what people who are not doctors are thinking about medical questions.
00:16:04.620I'm not sure we've ever had this situation before, because the doctors are on the front line, of course, making the front line decisions.
00:16:12.060But where we go in terms of opening things up, etc., will be medical decisions, essentially, balanced with economic decisions, but medical decisions made by non-medical people.
00:16:25.720So, given that I'm one of the people who talks about this stuff all the time, it kind of makes sense that doctors are pouring in to see what the non-medical people are feeling and try to sample as many windows into that as they can, because their fate depends on it.
00:16:41.360So, if we, if we, the pundits, get this wrong, it's a big problem, you know, it's a big problem, because the doctors will suffer from what the public decides, ultimately.
00:16:55.080And so I do appreciate that many of those doctors have sort of stepped up to become my mentors and informers.
00:17:05.140So, quite often, I'll be engaging on some topic on Twitter, and I'm very, very happy to see actual medical doctors pouring into the comments to clarify and fix misinformation.
00:17:19.400So, it's a tremendously good, it's a really good trend to watch the doctors start following the non-doctors, because it's important right now, and to fix our thinking, specifically.
00:17:32.680You know, there's going to be a lot of polls between now and Election Day, and I would argue, at this point, the only thing that matters to re-election is the coronavirus, I think.
00:17:45.820You know, maybe, maybe the Supreme Court, but it feels as though, because people are more influenced by whatever happened recently, and also whatever was the biggest, and this is the biggest, and it will be the thing that happened most recently.
00:17:59.300So, really, I would say that the few people who are swing voters probably are going to be mostly affected by the coronavirus response.
00:18:10.480But, I would say that when you're in the middle of the battle, the polling is useful and entertaining, you know, tells you something about what the middle of the battle looks like, but it doesn't predict.
00:18:21.300Because the only thing that we'll predict is winning or losing.
00:18:27.900And by November, we're going to have a much better consensus, of course, the country never agrees on everything, but it'll probably be at least a two-thirds consensus, one way or the other, that what our government did either worked or didn't work.
00:18:44.120So, that's all that will depend, that, you know, that's what's going to depend on the election.
00:20:28.460I got into an interesting conversation, which I don't understand a bit, because I'm not qualified,
00:20:35.020on false positives versus false negatives, and specifically looking at the tests in Santa Clara that showed there were a lot of people relative to what we expected.
00:20:46.160There were a lot of people with antibodies.
00:20:48.380Now, when I say a lot, it was, you know, a few percent.
00:20:53.120You know, somewhere in that, you know, one to four percent, depending on how you're looking at it, et cetera.
00:21:14.940And, he was pointing out that the tests probably are calibrated so that they take into account what they know about the accuracy of the testing so that that's all, you know, figured into it.
00:21:30.360And then other smart people came in and said, well, in order to do that, the only way you could be sure your test worked is to calibrate it against a test you know works.
00:21:43.020So, there's, apparently, there are no, you know, really reliable tests that could be calibrated against something that you know is reliable.
00:21:56.440Because the manufacturer of the tests presumably is testing it against some other standard.
00:22:04.460And it seems like if you got any kind of a positive, you would just retest it.
00:22:09.760Say, okay, you know, are we getting too many false positives and they would just retest with other devices until they were sure that it was real or sure that it was a false test.
00:22:20.460So, I think the manufacturer could use just a variety of other test kits to see if it was at least in agreement.
00:22:28.540And that would get you pretty close to knowing if you had a false positive.
00:22:34.100If you tested 1,000 people and you got one positive, well, it's pretty obvious that you should run that one positive through some other tests just to see if it's real.
00:22:47.980Would the manufacturer of the test that we're talking about, would they have rerun all 999 through all of the other tests which are available to see if they all get the same result-ish?
00:23:00.540And if some don't, then rerun again to make sure that, you know, they know what's going on?
00:23:21.340You know, my experience in the real world is that probably not.
00:23:25.080But maybe, because it's a medical world and, you know, one has to assume that they have higher standards than most of the world.
00:23:30.800But my point of it is that really smart people who are operating at a level that I can't quite reach, in other words, people who understand this world and can deal with the statistical ambiguities of it more capably than I can,
00:23:49.400are not quite on the same page about whether these tests are reliable or not.
00:23:56.360Now, I can't really judge, because, again, I'm not qualified.
00:24:01.740But isn't it interesting that something you would think would be as easy to know the truth of it, even that you can't?
00:24:10.320So, let me back you up to a bigger thought about all of this.
00:24:18.240Wouldn't you say that the most standard information you've gotten is that we should use facts to make decisions?
00:27:38.480So using just those general things plus some risk management, you're generally going to look for things that you can test and then pull back if you need to.
00:27:48.560So if you don't know what is the right answer, it usually makes sense.
00:27:58.460But it usually makes sense to take the strategy that is the most adaptable if it doesn't work out, that you can immediately say, oops, take it back.
00:28:07.880Now, if we were to reopen the economy and just say, all right, let's see what happens, just reopen everything, and the virus took hold and, you know, a million people got infected in a week.
00:28:21.240Could you think, could you easily reverse that?
00:29:01.300Well, here's one of the things that made me think that we need an IQ test, not a blood test for, or not a test for the coronavirus.
00:29:15.460So I tweeted this, which is a lot of people, a lot of people who believe that Trump talks complete, you know, BS 99% of the time.
00:29:26.780So his critics believe that pretty much everything he says is a lie, it's hyperbole, or it's BS.
00:29:35.080And yet they can't understand why Trump would say that President Xi is an awesome guy and China is doing a great job at the same time that he's trying to get a trade deal done.
00:29:46.860Do you really not understand how that works?
00:29:49.580Are there people who are really so dumb that they don't understand that President Trump is standing right in front of you on camera and winking as hard as he can?
00:30:33.920Do you think the President knows not to humiliate somebody he's trying to do a deal with in the middle of the deal?
00:30:41.440Oh, sure, maybe before and after, but not in the middle of the deal.
00:30:45.720If you're actually negotiating with somebody, you're going to be insulting them in public.
00:30:50.880Look, you need to get your IQ checked if you think the President should be insulting the President of China while we're trying to get something done.
00:31:21.520I don't think there's any question about it anymore, is there?
00:31:25.500The President has so clearly signaled that he's going to pardon, or grant clemency, to Roger Stone.
00:31:35.300It's just a matter of timing at this point.
00:31:38.260Now, Manafort is another situation, because, you know, that's just a darker situation.
00:31:45.440But I think the Roger Stone pardon is essentially guaranteed.
00:31:48.960Nancy Pelosi was asked by Chris Wallace yesterday to explain how she was saying that the President was underplaying the virus,
00:32:04.360and yet at the very same time, she was publicly going to Chinatown and telling everybody to enjoy Chinatown and the big crowds during the pandemic.
00:32:14.640And, of course, Chris Wallace was calling that out and saying, you know, you're criticizing the President for not taking you seriously at exactly the same time you were doing that, not taking you seriously, and inviting people to hang around in big crowds.
00:32:30.240And what was Nancy Pelosi's response to that?
00:32:35.180She said that the real point of that was to counter President Trump's racism, because she was worried that because he was calling the virus the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus, that it would stoke racism.
00:32:51.880And so she decided to go to Chinatown and get all the Chinese-American citizens infected with coronavirus and maybe die, so that they wouldn't feel bad that a virus was named after a country that they don't live in.
00:33:09.220So, this might be, if you could have some kind of an award for the most pathetic answer you've ever heard from a politician.
00:33:22.820I'm not even going to call it a lie, because it's so obvious a lie that you don't really need to call that out.
00:33:29.380You should at least, if you were going to lie, you should at least take a stab at making it sound a little bit believable.
00:33:37.600Do you think there's anybody, even in the Democratic Party, so, sorry about that technical glitch.
00:33:46.760Is it because of something I said about China?
00:35:05.460Because at least, you know, to the credit of Trump supporters, when Trump says something that we know is not true, we kind of know it, don't we?
00:35:15.940You know, don't you know it if he says, I had the biggest crowd size, you know, since the gladiators in the Coliseum?
00:35:26.720You know, don't you listen to it and you go, oh, maybe, maybe not.
00:37:03.620If you ever see a two-day gap with no Joe Biden live video, at this point, from here until the election, any two-day gap means he's out of the race.
00:37:18.780Now, the way he leaves the race, of course, is a great question.
00:37:22.600But I would think if he went dark for two days, and I don't know if he did, I need a confirmation of that.
00:37:28.060I saw a tweet on it, but he may have reappeared right after the tweet.
00:37:32.700Okay, people are saying no on Joe Biden.
00:37:35.680So if it's true that we haven't seen him for two days, it means the Democrats are talking him into leaving the race.
00:37:43.480Because I see no scenario that he would stay out of the public eye unless Democrats were talking him into getting out of the race and being replaced.
00:37:56.160I think that's happening right now, if he's been gone for two days.
00:38:02.700Now, you can say to yourself, no, no, Scott, the reason is he's not mentally capable, so they're keeping him off the airways, which I would say is really the same thing I just said.
00:38:11.400Because if they've kept him off video for two days because they don't think he's mentally competent at the moment, that also means they're having the conversation about replacing him.
00:38:22.660There's no way you would separate those two things.
00:38:29.260And then I saw one article, an opinion article on CNN, saying that Elizabeth Warren was the obvious best choice for vice president.
00:38:39.860And, of course, she made things interesting by saying that if Biden asked her to be vice president, she would say yes, which is sort of a weird thing to say.
00:38:48.940Usually you say, well, I'm not talking about that today.
00:39:50.400I don't know if anybody would vote against Warren if they're a Democrat.
00:39:56.340I could see people voting against Bernie, but Warren has that, I haven't been a communist all my life kind of vibe.
00:40:05.380So maybe she could soften her stance a little bit and still get in there.
00:40:10.920So Warren's actually an interesting choice.
00:40:12.760I'm going to stick with my prediction of Kamala Harris, in part because I think she has a better relationship with Biden, and Biden sort of has to be part of the decision.
00:40:35.840Isn't it great to know that China is not the enemy of the United States?
00:40:38.880But I would point out that China, who is not the enemy of the United States, has already killed more Americans this year with coronavirus and fentanyl than all of America's enemies added up over the past 10 years.
00:40:58.160Check, check, check my math, but I think that China, who says they're our friend, has probably killed maybe approaching 100,000 Americans in 2020.
00:41:09.840I think we'll hit 100,000 between fentanyl and coronavirus, probably over 100,000.
00:41:16.060And if you were to add up all of the Americans killed by every enemy country over 10 years, it wouldn't come close to 100,000, would it?
00:41:29.180Because you'd be adding up, you know, the two wars, and they don't even come close.
00:41:37.800Yeah, Massachusetts doesn't even like war, some people say.
00:43:47.240And those are two systems that can't fit together.
00:43:49.760So if we became non-transparent, well, maybe we'd have some, well, that probably doesn't work.
00:43:55.740Two non-transparent systems are not going to be very successful.
00:43:58.260But if they were to become transparent, and, of course, we're not your boss, we're not going to tell China they need to be more transparent.
00:44:06.940We're just not going to be in their game.
00:44:09.860So I don't think we should be in the business of telling China what to do because it doesn't work and it would be humiliating and there's no upside.
00:44:19.700But we could certainly tell them that while they're doing whatever they want to do, that system is not compatible with our system.
00:44:27.140So we're going to take our ball and go home.