Episode 834 Scott Adams: All The #Loserthink Around Coronavirus

Hey, everybody, come on in here. Did you miss me? I hope so. I'm back. Oh, yeah. You can't keep me away. Do you know how bad I had to feel yesterday in order to miss the simultaneous sip? I'm far more addicted to it than you are. But I'm back. And today we're going to enjoy the best simultaneous sip of the entire epoch. Epoch. Epoch. Epoch. It's a word. I don't know what it means exactly, but I used it anyway. Yes, let me explain. So I've been battling a intestinal problem, which for about one hour every day has me screaming in pain. Now, if I'm screaming in pain at 4am, I'm usually fine by the time it's time for the simultaneous ep. But yesterday the timing was unfortunately bad and I was screaming in pain at exactly when I needed to be on periscope. Now, I'm going to be completely honest with you. The thing that makes the pain go away is medical marijuana. It works every time. It works 100% and it takes maybe half an hour to kick in. So I've been staying as stoned as I can stay 23 hours a day. The only time I'm not is if I go to sleep and it wears off and I wake up in screaming pain, which is what happened yesterday. I woke up a little too close to the. To the periscope time, and I didn't have time to medicate. So if you're wondering, Scott, why does your energy seem a little different lately? It's because I've been doing these periscopes pretty stoned. Now, let me say as clearly as I can, I have never recommended marijuana as a party drug, but as a medicinal option, there are some things it does that just nothing else can do. Because do you know what the other drug I could be taking to avoid being in screaming Pain 24 hours a day? I think nothing, to the best of my knowledge. There's not even another thing. So I'm just being honest. But I think it's time for the simultaneous sip because we've gone two days without it. You need a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine is, end of the day, the thing that makes everything better. The simultaneous sip. Go. Ah. Anyway, long version short. I've got a. I've got a plan for getting rid of whatever the Hell is wrong with me? I think it's C. Diff. If you're a medical nerd, that's what's going on. But we'll take care of it. All right, let's talk about this coronavirus, because it's all we want to talk about. It's all we want to talk about. And one of the things that could happen, but I'm not seeing it happen, is that sometimes humanity needs a common enemy. You need a common enemy. And this coronavirus is a weird one because it should be a common enemy and it should be teaching us, hey, everybody, you better get along a little bit better, because here's a good example of why you need to get along. But it doesn't seem to be working that way. So it looks like some kind of an exception to the common enemy driving us together. It just doesn't seem to be. Now, the coronavirus is going to be a test, kind of a stress test or an edge case for what I call the Adam's Law of slow moving disasters. I've talked about this before in other contexts. And the idea is that when humans can see a disaster coming, and we all know it's coming and we've got time to prepare, we're usually fine. Because we're extraordinarily good at avoiding problems when we have enough time. For example, we've not run out of food, even though our population grows. We've not run out of fuel, even though our population grows. So. We're really good at it. But do we have enough time with this coronavirus? If all of the resources and creativity and energy of human beings went into solving this, which is, I think, what's happening right now, you're seeing massive resources being concentrated. Do we have enough time? Now? It may depend on how we manage it, how effective we are, how good our leadership is. But let me just throw out some thoughts. The biggest thing that's killing people apparently, is lack of ventilators, because if you're older or compromised, especially this coronavirus will get in your lungs, cause a pneumonia like symptoms, and apparently of the things we can actually do about it, there actually isn't much you can do about it. Once somebody has the virus, keep them comfortable, keep them hydrated. But mostly, if it's a real bad case, you need a ventilator, and there's not really anything else that makes much difference. So here's the question. How quickly could American engineers and manufacturers crank out ventilators in a crisis situation? You know, the United States famously became a manufacturing giant because of World War II, maybe World War I. I don't know my history that well. But the point is that when the country needs to put all of its resources toward manufacturing, there aren't many things we do better. We are like really, really good at manufacturing gigantic quantities of stuff when needed. We do it when we can make money, but we also do it for emergencies. So here's a question I just asked on social media, and I don't have that answer yet. You've seen CPAP machines, the things that people use for sleep apnea and snoring. How different is that from a ventilator? In both cases, there's a mask like thing that goes over your at least your nose, if not your mouth and your nose. It forces air into your lungs. CPAP, I think, is less than a BiPAP. I don't know my paps, but apparently there's a slightly different machine that's closer to a ventilator. But here's my point. There probably are not that many hospital ventilators compared to how many we might need. But I'll bet there are tons of CPAP machines. And the question is, in an emergency, if you had to, would a CPAP machine operate enough like a ventilator that could keep people alive? It's not your first choice, and you wouldn't want people on them 24 hours a day, but would it work in the short run? So it's a question. So the question is this. Are they close enough that we could get a bunch of those going? Because there are quite a few of them that are already available in the country. People are using them for sleep apnea, but maybe for short periods of time, a week, somebody with sleep apnea would say, you know, I probably won't die of sleep apnea in a week. It'll be uncomfortable, but maybe the guy let somebody borrow my machine. Now, I don't think we're anywhere near the point where people are going to be loaning their CPAP machine out because they might need it for themselves. But the point is, how hard would it be if we're already developing things like CPAP machines to start cranking them out like crazy, perhaps with some tweaks to make them more like bipaps or more like ventilators or to get that done. So it's an unknown. But anytime you rule out human ingenuity in terms of manufacturing, you're leaving on a really big variable. So it's entirely possible that two things could be true at the same time. It could be true that the Coronavirus is more lethal by its nature than maybe anything we've seen in this class, while at the same time, if we do a better job of treating the worst cases, it could also be the lowest death rate. So you can't rule out that we could be so good at responding compared to the past that it's the worst virus with the least amount of impact. It's possible one of the things that President Trump is getting some heat on, and indeed Rasmussen shows that his approval pretty quickly because of this coronavirus stuff. One of the things he's getting blamed for is his reaction to at the press conference, etc. And I don't know if people who are typically supportive of the President are going to be siding with him as hard as you normally would if it were just a political event, probably people just take sides, and it doesn't matter what the facts are, people just take sides. But in this case, I think you're seeing a lot more Trump supporters saying, you know, I'm not completely happy with the way things are going, but let's talk about that. Let's talk about how well the Trump administration is responding and how the media is treating them for that. The. The first thing I'd say is that if you are sure that the administration is responding poorly, or if you're sure that they're responding excellently, you're probably an idiot. Or you're either an idiot or you're lying. Because the fact is, we really can't tell the difference between a good job and a bad job unless it's so extreme that anybody could tell. But we're nowhere near anything like that. We're somewhere in that bumbling middle range where we're feeling our way through it. We're doing what we can. We're working with limited resources, collecting information. We're definitely in the bumbling phase of the crisis now. Human history suggests that we can move very rapidly from bumbling to, oh, my God, that was a good job. It is what we do, right? It's, you know, you put humans in that situation. Day one, bumbling. Day two, we know why we bumbled. Day three, oh, my God, you're doing a great job now. And that was faster than we thought. So we shouldn't make too much of how the first days go because they're likely to look bumbling. How rapidly we adjust is going to be the entire game. So how are we doing? I don't think so. Here's the bottom line on the loser. Think of looking at the administration's efforts so far, you cannot compare what we've done, we, meaning the administration in the United States, compared to what another president would have done, because we don't have that test. There's no other president doing the same job. But, you know, different policies under the same situation, you can't compare. So there is no reasonable way to know if another president would have done a little bit better than Trump or a little bit worse. Really no way to tell. One of the things that we could probably, let's say, have a good feel for, but still wouldn't know for sure, is that Trump by his nature, is a little more likely to close a border than another president. And there is some suggestion that the United States closing, at least its travel from China, hasn't closed as much travel as it could, still planes coming from Italy, for example. But by acting fairly aggressively and early, there's some suggestion that the United States bought itself two or three weeks because there's some thinking that the virus is coming. You just can't stop it. But we may have pushed back the big lump for a few weeks, which gives you time to prepare. So ask yourself, would a president who is in favor of more open borders, a president who is more concerned about how it would look race wise if the travel was closed, would another president have closed the borders so quickly or closed traveling? I guess so quickly. And I think the answer is not a chance, right? I think the answer is not a chance. So you don't know. I mean, maybe you throw a Bernie Sanders in there and he closes it on the first day. Maybe. But it seems unlikely, doesn't it? Because the anti Trumpers are all saying Chuck Schumer said he was being too hasty and it looked racist, et cetera, at the time. So if we're evaluating what Trump has done so far, the first thing is, did he act decisively and quickly, even though public opinion wasn't with him yet? And the answer is yes. Now, was it fast enough? There's nothing that will happen from any country or any entity that will be fast enough. Here's a rule that you should remember forever. If something is the right thing to do, you can't do it too fast. From the moment that it could have been done is when it should have been done if you wanted the best result. But we're human things take a while. There will never be a situation where even people who did the right stuff did it as quickly as it could have been done. That's not a thing. So if you see somebody criticizing somebody for not doing something fast, Enough. Just know that that can be said for every situation. Could be true, but it also could be true of every situation. All right, so here's. Here's what I think the President got most wrong. And I think people who are going to be criticizing him are going to have some traction on this. Number one, I've long been making the case that there's no such thing as a good president. There is only a president who is well suited for the specific challenges of the time. So, in other words, I believe if you were to take whoever you thought were your top 20 presidents, if they had been presidents in different circumstances, may not have been so good. So you have to have the right person for the right challenges. The best example is a wartime president might have different skill set than somebody presiding over a golden age with no specific war threats. This is all a long way of saying, I think President Trump is the wrong personality for this specific problem. That doesn't mean he'll do a bad job. I'm just saying it's an extra challenge. And here's why. If you have an optimist president, that is the greatest president you could have when he's trying to goose things that are already pretty good. And I would say that the Obama economy was solid by the time that Trump got it. If you're trying to take something from solid to really good, you want a President Trump. I doubt anybody could ever be better at that particular skill. It's a perfect fit of personality and circumstance. You know, things are good, but watch how good they're going to be. Whoa. Things are going to be amazing. It'll be the best it's ever been. It's going to be the lowest unemployment. That's exactly the president you want in that situation. But our situation suddenly changed. Now, this situation is that the best thing that the country could do is to panic a little bit. What I mean by that is you want the citizens to take this really seriously. You want them to do what needs to be done, but you don't want them to over panic, and you don't want them to sell off all their stocks before they should, etc. So you've got this really fine line here. Too much optimism makes you look like you're out of touch. And that's what the President did. The president applied a little too much optimism because that's who he is. You know, it's hard to turn that off if that's your core personality as optimistic. So given that Trump has two modes, one, he's trying to scare you about Something that's somebody else's problem, let's say immigration or China or whatever. And he's good at that. If he wants you to. Wants to scare you, he's good at that. If he wants you to feel optimistic because things are going great, he's good at that, too. What he's not good at, apparently, just based on what we've watched, is hitting that fine middle ground where you say, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, let me tell you, you need to take this as a 10 of importance. But at the same time, we're going to come out, we'll come out of this okay. That's a really hard message. And I would say that President Trump's just not the ideal person for that message. Great on optimism, great on scaring you, but take it seriously as a heart attack, but we'll be fine. That's just not his sweet spot. And I think we saw that. Next thing he did wrong was even though I think logically, the selection of Pence to lead off the thing, it might, and I don't know this, I'm just speculating it might be exactly the right thing, functionally. Because if Pence is a smart enough manager, and there's every reason to believe he's smart enough, what he's going to do is be the club. I think Azar called him the club within the government, but he's going to let the experts do the expert stuff. So he's already. Apparently there's some person with a medical background who's appointed to be sort of the czar below Pence. And of course, he'll have access to all the resources of the government, and. And he'll be able to beat people up faster than some other job could. You don't want an unknown leading an effort this important, because the unknown might not be able to pull all the levers and make the phone calls and get people to do things immediately, but the vice President of the United States, under the direct control of the president. I think if the vice president calls you under this circumstance, you kind of do whatever he wants, right, because he's got the authority in the office and he's close enough to the president. So it could be that this is exactly the right move, but it might not be. Let me give you a couple of other possibilities. The problem with Pence is that the knock against him from the other team, the Democrats, is that he's anti science. And, you know, the examples would be climate change and probably something in the LGBTQ world. But is Pence going to be anti science about a virus? Well, probably not, right? Do you think there's any chance that Pence is going to overrule any scientific or tactical person who is working on this? Is he going to say, you know, I hear all your science but I read in my Bible something different so I'm going to overrule you? No, no, that's not going to happen. There's not even the slightest chance that's going to happen. So I don't think there's any realistic risk that having a mic pen gives you any kind of anti science outcome. I think the risk of that is exactly zero. He is going to listen to the experts. I just feel like there's no real risk there. But it does look bad, I gotta say. If you're trying to make the country feel confident in your response, does Mike Pence get you there? Let me throw in a second idea just for comparison. This is not a suggestion, something for comparison. Suppose the president had put the military in charge of the response, whoever, a general of some kind. Would you feel more comfortable if the military were in charge of the coronavirus response or would you feel that it's scarier? So I think it could go either way there. I want to see in your comments if having the military in charge would you make you feel better or worse than having the civilian leader, Mike Pence. Remember, the advantage of Mike Pence is not his expertise, nor is he telling you it is. The advantage of Mike Pence is that he's a heartbeat away from the presidency and you don't want to send your B team after the coronavirus. If Mike Pence says something has to be done under these conditions with the authority that he's getting from the executive office, I think he's just a giant club for getting stuff done and that might be exactly what we need. So I'm looking at your responses and there seems to be a consensus that a military leadership would be scary. That's my feeling too. Here's the counter argument. The counter argument is it's going to get there no matter what. Meaning that if the emergency reaches a large enough critical level, it might be that nobody but the military would have the capability of handling whatever falls out from that. Now I don't know that that's necessarily true, but we could easily get there. All right, so is Mike Pence the right person? Probably the right person functionally, probably not the right person from a messaging and making the country feel comfortable. So I think the administration needs to sell that a little bit better. And that might be in the form of describing what Mike Pence is doing, not doing. And I think the country needs to see Mike Pence say, hey, America, I just want to be sure you understand that I, Mike Pence, will not be making medical decisions, and I'll be as transparent as I can so you can know what I'm doing and not doing. But mostly, I'm making sure resources get to the right place. I'm not going to be your expert, and I'm not going to slow down the experts. I'm going to accelerate them. I'm throwing resources toward the experts. So that's what I'm doing in my job. If he explains it that way, I think people are going to say, oh, okay, I get it. You're not trying to be a scientist. That would be a crazy idea. You're trying to get them money, basically. Get them money, get them attention, get them resources. All right, so you're seeing a bunch of criticisms from the usual suspects about Trump's performance here, and they're going for all these vague things such as, well, this president has degraded the credibility of the country, just when credibility will be the thing we need and trust. And you hear those arguments and you say to yourself, yeah, I mean, I understand the sentences. I get what you're saying, I understand why it even makes sense. But are we seeing any examples of that? What would be an example, either in the past or even potentially, in which the president's history of statements that the fact checkers don't like, or his history of dealing with other countries or other people makes any difference? What would be an example of that? Because I just don't see one. Especially in a crisis. People get pretty serious in a crisis, and I don't think that people are going to be stumbling over Trump's history of hyperbole. I just don't see how it becomes a real problem now. Will all of this affect the election is what you're asking me. You have an S. But I know you're thinking, and the answer is yes. If you asked me a couple days ago, I would have said, I don't know. Might affect the election, it might run its course before then. I would say, at this point, this is going to be a variable. And this is one of the reasons that I always am so careful to say, when I say that the President is heading for a. A landslide slaughter victory, I'm always careful to say, if everything stayed the same. And it won't. I always throw in and it won't. The one thing you can be sure of is that there will be surprises between now and election Day. Well, this is a pretty big one. I didn't see this one coming. So here's one of the surprises. Rasmussen is reporting that the President's approval went from 52 to 47 almost overnight, directly after his response to the coronavirus. So I believe the public has spoken. And the public just said, you know, I don't think you hit a home run here on this. But the bad thing is all of the reporting, the information is just so amazingly horrible, amazingly horrible, that it's hard to form a good opinion here. Let me ask you this. If you believe, and I tweeted this, if you believe, that the administration is not doing enough to be ready for or to combat the coronavirus, what specifically have they not done? They should have been done. That was also possible. Watch how many people have really firm opinions that the President has not done and is not doing the right stuff. But then you say, what would be an example of the right stuff? What is it that he hasn't done that he should do? And you're going to find people don't really know what should be done. They don't know what he has done and they don't know what he should do, but they're pretty sure they have an opinion on it. So because it's a big, complicated and confusing situation and because the pundits will be spinning this in the most anti Trump way, I think it's going to leave a mark. Now, the way that this could turn positive for the President is that he said something pretty outrageous and this is hurting him too. He's kind of acted like we're going to be fine or that there's a good chance that we'll be fine. Whereas the experts are saying, you know, there's not even a chance we're going to be fine. The experts are pretty clear. There's sort of nothing you can do. This virus is coming our way. We're just going to get it. That's all there is to it. Now, again, what is it the President should have done that he hasn't done? Do we not have enough money for something? I've seen no report. Have you seen any report that something stopped or couldn't be done because we didn't have funding? I'm not aware of any reporting like that. So money wise, no. Are you aware of anybody who hasn't done the thing they were supposed to do? Maybe. I don't know of anybody now. So that's the unknown. The Other big unknown is the death rate. Now, I talk all the time about the two movies on one screen, and we've got another just perfect example of it. Whenever you have complicated situations, that allows people to interpret them as entirely different movies. But the amazing thing is when people look at the same fact, it's on video. It's right there. You can look at it, and they still come away with different ideas about that one fact that we can both look at and replay. It's on video. You can see it as much as you want and still have a different opinion of what that fact was. And that happened again on cnn. So you probably have seen by now the clip of Dr. Gupta asking a question at the press conference. And Dr. Gupta's question was about the relative danger and lethality, the death rate of the coronavirus versus the regular flu. So here's what Gupta said, and I'm going to paraphrase a little bit to tell the story. So Gupta says that the regular flus have a mortality rate of 0.1, so a tenth of 1%. And then he goes on to say that the coronavirus has something like a 2 to 3%, which could be, you know, 20, 25 times worse than a regular flu. President Trump says it's higher than that. So that's what President Trump said. He said it's higher. Now Gupta goes and talks to, I think it was Anderson Cooper after. And he's talking about his question and the answer. And this is what Gupta says happened. And remember, this is on video. You can go watch it yourself. What Gupta says happened is that the President said on live TV during that press conference that the regular flu had a higher death rate than the coronavirus, which of course is not only wrong, it's wrong by a factor of 25. It would be exactly upside down. So Gupta and CNN are talking about how dumb the President is that this most critical fact about the coronavirus that he has upside down, and he did it during a press conference about the coronavirus at the very time you should be the best informed. He was completely uninformed, backwards. Except that didn't happen. Go watch the video. The entire report about the President getting those two figures backwards didn't happen. But Gupta goes on camera and he talks about it like it just happened, like you just watched it. So I had to go back and watch it. And I was like, what the hell am I seeing? That's not even close to whatever Gupta just saw. I mean, he was there. And I'm watching the video of the exact exchange and here's how I interpreted it. Gupta said the regular flu has a death rate of 0.1. And then he continues talking and he says coronavirus 2 to 3%. The president says it's higher than that. I interpreted it to say that the President was saying that the regular flu is worse than what Gupta is saying now. I don't think it is, but he's saying it's worse than you're saying. Gupta interpreted that as saying that a regular flu is worse than coronavirus, which Trump didn't say. That's just something that Gupta interpreted. Now, I watched it and I thought, no, I'm watching the same words at the same time. That's not how I interpret it. And the reason I don't interpret it that way is that it would be crazy now if Trump said that the regular flu is worse than people said. He's right or he's wrong. But it's sort of immaterial. It's not terribly important to the story. But the way CNN interpreted it was that he had reversed something that's 0.1 with something that's 2 to 3. 25 times difference. And that's a gigantic difference. Somebody in the comments, somebody says, I saw that and I was confused. Here's what CNN should have done. They should have said his answer was ambiguous. We better find out what he meant. That would have been honest because I think they were sort of expecting Trump to be so uninformed that they leapt to that conclusion. And, you know, if that's true, well, I would be amazed. Now, it's also reported, and this part is just head shaking, but maybe I'm just uninformed. So fill in the blanks for me here. It's reported also on CNN that the President was not aware that the regular flu, just the normal annual flu in its different forms, also kills tons of people. And CNN is reporting that he learned that just before the press conference from some expert who told him that. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, where's the evidence of that? That's a pretty big claim saying that the President only just learned before his press conference on the coronavirus, that he had just learned minutes before that, that the regular virus kills lots of people. You better show me the quote. You better show me more than one named source or I'm going to say that didn't happen. Because it's a little bit mind ready, isn't it? Do you exactly know what he was thinking? Here's what I do think is likely. I do think it is likely that before he went on, he was being updated about how bad the regular flu is. And I think most of us, every time we find that even though we all know that lots of people die from the regular flu, when you hear the actual numbers, it's kind of shocking, even if you know the general idea that the regular flu kills a lot of people. I believe that he was reminded of those numbers before he talked. And when Gupta said that the Regular flu kills 0.1, President just having just been briefed that the regular flu is bad stuff, may have applied his usual hyperbole and said, you know, it's even worse than that. So, in other words, it probably didn't happen the way CNN reported it. So don't trust anything the news tells you about any of this stuff. Now, one of the questions I had was, how do you calculate the death rate of a virus if you don't have the denominator? In other words, you know, if you're doing a ratio of dead people to people who have the virus but did not die, well, you have the numerator, because when people die, we're a little bit better at counting that because that's a discrete event and you can usually tell if it was the coronavirus or not. So the numerator, dead people. We probably know that. But there is a strong suggestion that there might be a lot of asymptomatic people, people who don't have any symptoms, who might have the, you know, their carriers. So until you know that, do you know anything now? People send me papers on Twitter that are brainy, papers from PhDs that suggest there are statistical ways that they can determine this. For example, in China, they can take a group of several hundred people and they can just test them, and then they can find out how many of them had it that would not have been discovered. But really, a few hundred people that got tested in China, number one. Do you believe their data? No, you shouldn't. You shouldn't believe any data that comes out of China for that or really anything else. And secondly, what about the people who have mild symptoms who are hiding? If you were Chinese and you had a sniffle, would you tell anybody? I don't think so. I think you would just tell your family, hey, just, you know, just shove the food under the door for a couple weeks. I'm going to be hiding in this room over here. Don't tell anybody I'm here. I can't believe for a second that we can get the denominator right. So here's a possibility. And one, I think that Trump unwisely suggested is possible, which is that we might be fine. In other words, it might not be worse than a regular flu. When all is said and done for a few reasons. One is we may be responding to this far more aggressively than regular flus. That could make a difference just in survival rates. But it's also possible that this is the most most viral flu we've ever had. Just see if you can follow along on this. We haven't ruled out the possibility that it's the most viral virus we've ever had. Just people can get it really easily at the same time that maybe most of the people who get it don't have much in the way of symptoms or even notice it. So we really don't know the denominator. We've got smart people guessing that it's really high and scary. I think we should act as though it's big and high and scary. That's the smart thing to do. You don't want to err in the wrong direction. But Trump has opened up the possibility that maybe in the end this won't be worse in terms of death than the regular flu. Still would be terrible. All right, What else we got going on here? It's kind of a frustrating crisis because there's not much you can do, right? You can wash your hands, but really you could put on a mask. But apparently there's a disagreement about whether that makes any difference or makes things worse. Who knows? So here's what Trump said about this quote. It's going to disappear one day. It's like a miracle. It will disappear. Trump said at the White House Thursday. He also warned that things could get worse before it gets better. But then he added, it could maybe go away. We'll see what happens. Nobody really knows. Now, in terms of technical accuracy, I think he's accurate. It is accurate to say that there are some unknowns here and we might be surprised. We've been surprised lots of times by things we thought would be worse than they were. Right. It's fairly common. We thought that the oil spill in the Gulf would be way worse than it was. We thought that the year 2000 bug would be way worse than it was. We thought climate change as bad as people think it will be, for years, people have been suggesting it would be way worse. So the president, you know, if you're looking, if you're a certain age and you've seen how many times things were predicted to be a crisis, and then in the end, in hindsight, you looked at it and you said, I guess we did pretty good on that. We got on that early, as somebody's saying in the comments, I guess we did pretty good. So I don't think the President is wrong that we could find out that we're better at handling this than. Than current evidence would suggest. But I do think he messaged it wrong. The right sweet spot would have been a little less optimism because it makes him look a little out of it. I think it would have been cleaner and on message to say, you know, the experts say it's coming, but we're America, we're going to get through this. And, and we might get lucky. But you shouldn't plan on it. You should plan. You should plan for it to be a big event and you should prepare for it. And we're going to get through this. We are America, and we'll do better than other countries and we'll help other countries if we can. That's the sort of message I want to hear. But if I hear the President saying one day he might wake up and it's a miracle it will disappear, then I think that's not really the leader messaging I want to hear. So he needs to fix that. I think. Let's see. I understand that we still have travel coming in from Italy and they have some cases there. I'd love to know what kind of thinking goes into when you close an airport. I get that we're trying to protect the economies and stuff, but I don't know, Italy, maybe you want to think about closing stuff down. The Swiss government has banned all large scale events. More than a thousand people. How soon before we do that? I think we're going to see our schools close and large events all canceled is my guess. I would be surprised if this spring we see a full slate of stadium sports and that sort of thing. All right. You know, one of the weirdest parts of this whole coronavirus story is that there are four members of the Iran ruling regime who have confirmed coronavirus cases. And of course, the Ayatollah is up there in age 80, whatever, and that's the dangerous zone. So what are the odds that the Ayatollah has not been infected by now? If four members of the regime who have met with him recently and met with people who have met with him, what are the odds? I would say the odds are pretty good that the Ayatollah has got this already or will get it. What are the odds that he would die? Well, he's that age. He would have the best health care. But he's that age. So there's something like somebody calculated 9%. I think Ken calculated this. A 9% chance that there will be a regime change in Iran just because of the virus. You wouldn't bet on that, but I think there's a solid sub 10% chance that it could be a regime change event. Here's some Good news. The GOP minority leader, McCarthy has introduced some climate change, I guess you call it a Republican response to climate change. And what's different about it is that it acknowledges CO2 as a problem and warming is a problem, but it promotes gas, natural gas, and nuclear as two of the biggest pillars. And I think that's what we've been waiting for, because the President had been basically unarmed when it came to talking about climate change. But this McCarthy thing gives him a path that is completely compatible with all past statements. Because whether you believe that climate change is a big problem or not a problem, you'd still want to sell as much natural gas as you could because it's better than the alternatives. And we sell it. The United States makes a lot of it. And you'd still want to build nuclear as quickly as you can for a whole variety of reasons. One of them is getting enough energy, polluting less preparing for the war in space where we want to have. We're going to need a good nuclear scientific community for all that. So anyway, that's some good news, but it's not getting much attention because this coronavirus has taken all the attention. Speaking of which, Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri, has some legislation that will allow the United States to better diversify away from being have too much of our medical supplies in one place outside the country. So the big problem is that China makes a lot of our medicines and medical supplies. And this Josh Hawley legislation, proposed legislation, would make it easier to identify where our problems are so we can bring more manufacturing to safer places like the US And I think that's a great idea. Yeah, I'm not even going to say that one. So this would be gigantic news, except for the coronavirus. But apparently Syrian forces, which probably means Russia in this case, apparently they bombed and killed a few dozen Turks somewhere in Syria. So Turkey is responding by opening their border and letting refugees flow into Europe. What? So we have this weird NATO situation because on one hand, we back our NATO ally, Turkey, against Syrian and probably Russian military action against them, but wasn't an accident. Why did they do it? We don't really know what's going on there because, you know, 30 people could have Been one missile, one bomb that went wrong. So we don't know exactly what's going on. But can we have a NATO ally who just opened its border to pour a bunch of refugees into Europe? What kind of a NATO ally is that? That's not much of a NATO ally, is it? So we're watching that. I guess the biggest news about that is that we don't care. Does the United States care if Syria and Turkey are killing each other? I mean, we wish nobody were dying, right? But in terms of our national interest, I just don't know if we care. Now, I would like to ask you this question. For those of you who have been watching my periscopes. When the first news broke of the coronavirus in China, some of you saw me give a rather expletive laden periscope in which I was calling for closing the airports. And this is a question because I don't know the answer. Was I the first person that you heard say, close the airports? Because, you know, I like to do an audit of what I have tried to persuade and how it did and whether it's compatible with what actually happened. You can't really tell if you made a difference, but you can tell if it's compatible with what happened. But in the public realm, was I the first person that most of you saw saying, close the effing airport? And can we say at this point, some people are saying no. So I'd like to. If other people were saying it, I would be interested in that. But my expletive laden periscopes became very viral. And as you know, a lot of people watch them who are part of the government and part of the media. And I'm thinking, I don't know if anybody went as strong as early as I did. And I'd like to think it was helpful. So Taleb said, close it down. But did he persuade as aggressively as I did? So I'm saying other names. People said to shut it down. Steve Bannon was first. Well, I'd like to know who was early and persuasive in that. I will not make the claim that I was first because that doesn't make any sense. Who knows who's thinking what, where, at what time. But I like to think that I did something useful by getting in as fast as I could and being as, let's say, aggressive as I was about that point. Persuasion check. You're biasing responses. Yeah, I am. We're also seeing way more decoupling talk than ever before. I'm certainly one of the most active people talking about decoupling, I would not be the strongest voice for that, but certainly doing my part. So it could be the bandit was first. Some people are saying anyway, it doesn't matter who was first, but the people who were there early and were aggressive about it. Pat yourself in the back. I think that, you know, I was talking about this before that our form of government has transmogrified or evolved from being something like a republic to something more like a direct democracy where influential people on social media are pushing the government. So instead of, instead of electing people and they go off and make decisions on your behalf, the public is more directly pushing the politicians on these issues. That we understand. I think this is an example. I would say that the public, and primarily social media, I think that the persuasive people on social media probably saved the United States two to three weeks to help us get prepared. And again, I don't know if the preparation makes a difference, but probably does. So I would say congratulations to anybody who was on social media who was part of really aggressively pushing the government to act quickly and decisively in a way that everybody knew would be politically unpopular. Everybody knew it would be politically unpopular. But the President did it and he did it pretty quickly. And I think he did it because of social media pressure. And I think you got to pat yourselves on the back, right? Because anybody who retweeted my curse laden opinion or anybody who retweeted Bannon or anybody else who was saying the same thing, Mike Cernovich, Jack Posabek, any of those people you all helped, you were directly part of that solution. So pat yourself on the back. Who knows how it all turned out, but I feel as if reason won, didn't it? You know, I feel like the system kind of proved itself pretty well there. All right. I think that's about all I got to talk about. Somebody said you were more aggressive, but not necessarily the first. I think that probably is the most accurate statement. I believe I was the most aggressive of the people who were early. But being early and not aggressive, I don't know if that made a difference. Being early and being crazy about it gets more attention. All right, that's all I have to say for now and I will talk to you later.