The Ricochet Podcast - The One We Did On Video

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

Strange times call for improvisation and trying new things. So this week The Ricochet Podcast isn’t just a podcast, it’s also a Zoom webinar (sorry, the video is only for Ricochet members — not a member? Join today!). See James Lileks’ secret TV studio designed by a dyslexic! Rob Long owns and prominently displays Communist propaganda! Peter Robinson is wearing a sweater! Wait, that’s not a... Source

Yeah, it works fine now, but this thing's going to cut off any minute. It can't. It doesn't seem to remember to keep the settings. I'm going to be put in the same order I'll be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory and by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. Our country wasn't built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down. My call was perfect.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Liqueche Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lalix. Today we are on video. We've got a great guest. We have Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. So let's have ourselves a video podcast. I can hear you. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 489, also known as the peering uncomfortably at the script to figure out which thing I'm supposed to say that was supposed to be spontaneous edition.

We're doing this live, which means a whole different set of things apply, which means we had to bathe and shave before we got up here, which means we had to actually look presentable in order to give you a video as opposed to just three guys yapping in a room. And those three guys yapping would be me, James Lilacs here in Minneapolis, Rob Long in New York, and Peter Robinson in San Francisco with a background to match. Gentlemen, good morning, good day, whatever time it is. Good morning. And the first revelation is, James, watching you,

you're so relaxed after listening to you for all these years. I somehow thought that bringing off that voice, that lovely eloquence was a little bit of a strain. I would see you working at it, but not at all. This is really quite annoying. If you'd like me to just be all twitchy. Yes, that's what I've been imagining all these years. You're so good at what you do that I thought it would be hard work. Upon seeing you, I was stunned to find that you weren't vibrating in place like the tasmanian devil that's great to know perhaps after this cup of coffee i'll be doing better the coffee supplies by the way everybody are holding up the toilet paper the beer the food everything else minnesota goes into lockdown into in for two weeks at five o'clock tonight but you

guys are there beforehand you are already in lockdown. Tell us how you're doing. How's it feeling? You going nuts? I mean, from the look of where Rob's sitting, he's, I mean, it's one of those palatial New York places that we all dream of having. So how are you guys doing? I'm doing fine.

I'm tired of Zoom. I'm tired of doing Zoom conferences. I'm also a little bit i kind of feel like a little bit like um everyone's taking this an opportunity to pretend they're on television uh i had a meeting with some people yesterday and they all had i mean no offense to your lovely backgrounds but they all have backgrounds and stuff and everybody's acting like they're they're on cnn or fox news and then I turn on CNN, Fox News. And in fact, everyone seems to be on Zoom there too. So it does seem like the American century

is now considerably over in a lot of ways, including show business, because we don't even have nice studios anymore. There's our takeaway. Rob says, dump your Zoom stock. Video quality, yeah. Right. Peter, how goes it for you?

How goes it for me? Same, same, same. In a beautiful part of the world where no doubt it looks gorgeous and spring is upon you. Spring is upon us-ish. It's been a little bit gray, a little bit rainy. But cabin fever, just what Rob mentioned. I have a couple of kids who are under work-at-home orders. They decided they'd rather work at our home than in their small apartments. So we have a couple of kids who are under work-at-home orders, and they decided

they'd rather work at our home than in their small apartments. So we have a full house. What I've noticed is that people are getting... Gyms are all closed, so nobody can go to the gym. Northern Californians can't really figure out what to do if they can't do vigorous exercise for an hour a day. And so what's happened is that the beaches, although I think a beach yesterday got closed, the beaches and the foothills near here are full of people. People are walking their dogs. They're out walking the trails in the foothills. So I went out walking the last couple of days and you see a friend and you start to get close to chat and then you both suddenly stop because there are signs everywhere saying that if people don't stay 10 feet apart the parks are going to

be closed down it's all very weird to tell you the truth it's like having the iranian morality police come along and switches that i read something the other day that's exactly the other day that said the reason that iran is having such a bad time with it is that they the citizens don't get enough vitamin d because they're all shrouded yes because the dress code so which which leads you to believe that the people who are least likely to get it then are the people standing out in las vegas and g-strings you know at two o'clock in the afternoon they're going to be bulletproof they're solid of course vegas is closed everything's closed america's closed now last week when we were talking we were you know, at two o'clock in the afternoon. They're going to be bulletproof. They're solid. Of course, Vegas is closed. Everything's closed. America's closed.

Now, last week when we were talking, we were, you know, we had a spirited discussion about prevention versus practicalities of saving the economy. That discussion seems to be over. Does anybody believe that we're going to, I mean, the president is saying that he wants to be opened by Easter,

which I think is a reassurance that this is the goal. Not necessarily a strategy, and it's not necessarily a promise. Do you think it's likely that that's going to happen, Rob? I don't know, but I really don't know. I think that he, you know, I, again, I'm in the weird position of sort of defending what he does. I, I, I, I'm full disclosure. I'm not watching the press conferences, which I understand are just, just what we used to call Chinese fire drills, like the rest of the administration's response to this. We can't say that anymore. We can't

even call it a Chinese virus. So I'm not watching those. So I don't really, I don't get the full effect of that incompetence. But I think everything that he seems to be saying things that people want to hear and saying things that people are, some things that he's supposed to say, which is that this isn't going to last forever. Look, April 12th, whatever that is, that's the,

that's four weeks almost from certainly from when, when things got serious in New York city. And I think we'll start to see a downturn. I think some parts of the country will be lifted and some countries, some parts may not be. But if we all go out, uh, afterwards and, you know, we Purell and we, you know, keep our hands clean and don't touch our face, it's, we should be over the hump. I mean, I think that's the problem is what you don't want to do

is you don't want to open up everything up and you don't want to call it, you know, soundly all clear and say everything's normal and fine. And the businesses get to open up, but nobody goes to the businesses. I mean, that is a bigger disaster than the government closing your business, is having a business that's open and nobody's showing up. Then you really are going to lose money, and it's your money you're going to lose. This way, the government is saying, the country is saying, look, everything shuts down for two weeks, two and a half weeks, and we're going to compensate you with your payroll. We're just going to basically hit freeze. Everybody's going to freeze in place, and we'll restart in two and a half weeks. That at least has some clarity

to it. What you don't want to do is to say, oh no, all clear. And then most people are saying, well, you know what? I'm hearing different things. It's not as if the government, it's not as if Donald Trump, it's not as if Nancy Pelosi, it's not as if Bill de Blasio have been consistent here. So you're going to get people saying, I don't care what the president says, I'm still not going out. I don't care what the mayor says, I'm still not going out. And in that case, that's actually kind of considerably worse than just keeping everything closed for a few more days. But Rob, you said, and I'll toss this over to Peter. You said at the start there that the press conferences have been

Chinese fire journal, just like everything else the administration has been doing in a response. So you would say your opinion then as the administration is botched, did botch, has botched, and probably will continue to, what exactly in their current response do you find to be inadequate or mistaken? I mean, I'm listening to the docs and listen to Felucci and blicks and I'm getting, I'm getting information. Listen to Pence. Then I'm hearing stuff.

That's not a doctor. So look, I just think that I don't mean the fact. I don't mean, he's not a doctor, but we know he's not, he's not a doctor, but when Pence says that he went to 3M and he talked to them and

they had the relaxation of the standards so they could get more masks out there, that's information that's that, that tells me they're doing something, or at least this was two, three, four weeks ago. Right. So I'm sorry, what was the question? I'm just defending.

I'm saying, yes, Pence is not a doctor, but some of the information these people are providing is actually useful as to what they're doing. Yeah, look, I mean, yes, that's true. And I think that's probably a wise thing to do. And they seem to be doing a good job. I mean, based on what is in fact has been sort of colossal American incompetence. I mean, look, we have to be really honest with ourselves. We blew it. I don't mean that Trump blew it. I don't mean that Obama blew it. I mean, we sort of as a society, we don't like to prepare for things. Or we don't like to think about these things and we don't like to spend money and prepare for stuff that could happen. We just don't like it. And we blew it. And so now we're sort of stuck inside. We're stuck inside because we didn't have enough masks because they told us we didn't need masks. Because I think that masks

are kind of helpful in a lot of ways for people to wear. They remind you not to touch your face. They remind you, if you do touch your face, face you touch the mask and your hands are the what's the problem you know we we laugh at at at asian tourists who come to this country and they're always wearing a mask we go ha ha ha why are they doing that turns out they're doing that because they're terrified of sars which actually turns out to be a kind of smart thing you know you drive on highways in america and you see in the east coast anyway or whenever it's cold you see these giant concrete domes look like giant beehives. And inside is sand or salt when it gets icy. Now, it hasn't gotten icy in the past couple of years. Does that mean that we shouldn't have the salt there?

I mean, we have strategic oil reserves in Bakersfield, right? We've had them for a year. We've had them for so long. The teapot dome scandal was about that. That's how long we've had strategic oil reserves in this country. we need to be thinking about this the way we think about national security and we just just just fell down on the job we just thought it wasn't gonna i agree to a certain extent last week we had last week we had lots of controversy and you two you and peter were just and people loved it so i'm gonna throw it over to peter now and say peter uh take rob to task for the part

about how we blew it because there's a lot of we's here. There's who exactly is the we, we. And I'm living in a place that's responding quite differently than New York is and quite differently than Washington. Well, I don't know. If we contrast this administration with some kind of ideal administration, Plato's informed princes, but they're not available anywhere. The idea that Hillary Clinton, who didn't run a campaign wise enough to get herself to Michigan or Pennsylvania or Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, thank you very much. The idea that she or any of her people would have been any more competent, it's just not clear to me that that's so.

For sure, next time around, from now on, we will have stockpiles of masks. There are going to be a lot more ventilators available. People will understand how to erect emergency tents for overflow, ICU units. All that's true. To my, as best I can tell, and we can discuss this with our guest who knows far more about it than I think any of us, as far as I can tell, the emphasis right now, the way to settle this question of how do we come out of it, who gets to go back to work, who still needs to remain under quarantine, as we move from a total shutdown to let's restart the economy. The whole name of the game is testing, testing, testing, testing,

far more testing, regular sample testings, even the way we conduct political polls, so that you have some idea where the country stands during a presidential contest. We need regular, in effect, random testing, so you know the way the disease is progressing across the country as a whole and in particular regions. And that'll give us a truer picture of the mortality rate. It'll begin very quickly to give us a truer picture of which regions are having serious problems and which are not. As best I can tell, there's some that really just are not. And I guess above all, it'll start to identify people who've had the disease and come through it and are therefore tremendously useful, both for medical purposes. Their blood plasma can be used to treat people who are suffering terribly, and they're also tremendously useful in reopening the workforce.

So more tests of more of the population. As best I can tell, that's going to begin to happen. It's beginning to happen right now, but we need massive, I think we need massive testing. We'll ask our guests. Testing, that's my mantra. Between now and can we reopen on Easter? What will that look like? Don't know.

But if we start doing a lot of testing over the next two weeks, we will know, I believe. Rob made the point that we've got all the sand and ice waiting to hit the roads when the road conditions get bad. We haven't used it for a couple of years. That's true, but there is not in place sufficient asphalt ready to roll if there was an earthquake that split apart the entire road infrastructure system, which is sort of what we're having. In other words, I would like to think that these guys had planned for the worst case scenario and had everything stockpiled and apparently from some stories they did 2009 there was a depletion of the ventilators and equipment after the swine flu event and nobody bothered to restock it

afterwards all of which goes it's you know is it strict variance with what we've been told by the movies and it makes you wonder whether or not people in the cdc watch a movie like outbreak or epidemic and think wow we got all that stuff. We got helicopters that can take us to the other part of the world and doctors that can hold up the vial and get the vaccine. Awesome. But we don't. So, you know, did New York stockpile enough equipment? I'm reading the stories of these horrified people in the press who are saying the richest city and the richest nation in the country.

And they're wearing garbage people in the press who are saying the richest city in the richest nation in the country and we've got and they're wearing garbage bags in in the hospitals well why is that where there was money for a lot of things but not for that so what is it about your system of government your ideology your priorities that tell you we've got to spend all of this extraordinary amount of money on these other things but we lack it for this is this going to make a readjustment of priorities because they're good i hope so i hope so but i i i would just say i i think that it's it's not um it's just not relevant and not even material to like think about this in a partisan way i mean the fun partisan stuff that's happening is watching all my sort of woke uh manhattanites discovering the joys of plastic bags. That's kind of fun. You know, everybody sort of learning actually how fun it, the fun of it is like watching them. But it's true, but it's trivial.

Right. But that's about the only partisan argument you can make here. I mean, the Democrats are making this big hay about the fact that there was a bureau in the National Security Council that was for fighting infectious diseases that Trump cut. It was there. He cut it. But it's been put in and cut and put in and cut at least four or five times by George W. Bush, who put it in first place, and then Obama, who took it out and then put it back in and then I think took it out again. I'm not quite sure how many flips it was because it just, it didn't seem to address the problem. It didn't seem to be relevant. So, you know, the partisan or at least ideological conclusions you can draw from this are probably, uh, ancillary and on the side, but it is a, it is, it is an American attribute. We, it is normally, it is incredibly, incredibly accurate and something that we're proud of and something that we're right to say. We are exceptional. This is an exceptional country,

but we are not exceptional to a virus. And the virus hits us just like it hits everybody else. And we need to start thinking about biological protection, virus protection as a national security issue that we treat like a national security issue and we maintain readiness. I mean, look, the Pentagon has plans drawn up for what happens if Mexico invades us? What happens if we have to go to war with France, right? These are actual plans they can take off the shelf and blow off the dust and then put into place in 10 hours. And that's what we need. And we need to think of it just exactly that way. Right now, Peter's right. What we need is testing. And, you know, I am, as I said last week, and I'll say this week, I am mostly supportive of the Trump administration's actions right now,

given the hand that they were dealt. I wish the president wouldn't go on TV and lie about tests. There aren't as many tests as, and he knows it. That'll change over the next week, but it's not true now. And that said, though, I mean, you know, there's a whole bunch of things that we know we don't know. And as we start to know those things that we don't know now, which will happen in the next five, six, seven days, April 12th may seem like it's actually a perfectly reasonable date. I certainly hope so. You know, this would usually be the spot in normal times where I start to work my way into a spot

and Rob gets out his, you know, his cattle. Yeah, I'm not doing that now. Can't do that on video. It has definite drawbacks. You know, it certainly does. One of the things that I learned this week was that if you want to know why television killed radio, listen to the Joe Exotic podcast and then watch Tiger King on Netflix. Have you watched Tiger King yet?

Oh, it's extraordinary. It's a great story. And the podcast was great. And the podcast was riveting. But when you see it all, it's a whole different story. But anyway, I was going to say to Rob, do you have a dog in New York? No. Sadly, my dog passed away in New York.

I know. And we remember that. But you haven't brought a new dog into your no not yet not yet but i will because i read that in new york city the shelters are empty everybody wants a friend and they're oh that's great to stay with them which is fantastic and you know because but your dog's health if you have one is every is as important as every other member of your family and it starts with what you feed them but here's question. Do you know what's in your dog's food? Yeah. Well, Ollie, Ollie puts dogs first with vet formulated and fully transparent ingredients to give your dog. Well, frankly, just the healthiest food that's possible.

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Institute for Economic Policy Research. His research focused on the constraints that vulnerable populations face in making decisions that affect their health status, as well as the effect of government policies and programs designed to benefit vulnerable populations. He's worked for three years as an economist at the Rand Corporation at Santa Monica, California, where he also taught health economics as a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Received a BA in economics, an MD, and a PhD from Stanford. You know, just your average run-of-the-mill Joe, when you think about it. Thanks for joining us, Doc J.

And I have to say, Doc J, I didn't mean that, Doc J. I mean you, Doc J. It's kind of a ricochet thing. So let's talk about the coronavirus, the novel COVID-19, the Wuhan flu, whatever you want to call it. There's been an argument about its mortality. They say that perhaps now the stats were wrong in Wuhan. It wasn't 4.5, it was 1.3.

What does it matter to those of us who are looking at this? How lethal is it? And frankly, what do we know about the virus at this point? I think that that is the, to me, that's the critical number. How many people, if you get the virus, how likely is it you're going to die? A virus that kills 4% of everybody that infects is an absolutely deadly virus that it would have catastrophic consequences if a large number of people are infected. So if 100 million people in the United States are infected with a 4% death rate virus, that's 4 million people dead. It's unimaginable,

right? If the virus death rate is 0.1%, which is what people think the flu is, and 100 million people are infected, well, then that's 100,000 people dead. So the problem with this COVID virus is that we don't have a vaccine, unlike the flu. So it really could have 100 million people infected, especially given the evidence that it spreads very, very rapidly. It's called a doubling time, which means double the number of people get infected every three days is the doubling time. Very rapid infection.

And the question is, how deadly is it? So in my analysis of the data, I see two different possibilities. Either you have an epidemic that is incredibly infectious, infecting a very large fraction of the population, but lethal like the flu, 0.1, maybe even less. Or, and this is also consistent with the data, you have an infection that infects a small number of people but kills many, many, many of them. One of those two things is true. The policy response that you should have in those two cases are entirely different, right? In the situation where you have a very deadly virus that affects a small number of people, it might actually make a lot of sense to have a universal quarantine, you know, contact

tracing, that kind of thing. When you have a virus that's spread everywhere, most people get relatively mild versions of it, but a few people get a very, very severe version of it and die, you have a very different policy response. And so the question is, how widespread has the virus been? Is the virus now? How widespread has it been? And that is a question to which the scientific community does not know the answer. So that's the point I want to make. I'm sorry to get technical. I know this is, I've listened to you guys' podcast.

I know you guys like to joke around. I'll try to find a joke, but I don't know how to joke. That's okay. Rob will find plenty of jokes, Jay. You just play it straight. Hey, Jake, can I just jump in? I got a question it hit uh china and south korea and hong kong and singapore and it's hit italy why don't we have a better idea of the numbers i mean is there what's what's what's is it what are we doing wrong what

are they doing wrong is it because the chinese lie it was a technical problem so it's a new virus right and the first tests of it it's an rna virus and so we we very very rapidly found a test that could measure whether you have the virus in you it's called a pcr test technically but the the key thing is you have to have the rna virus in you for the test to turn positive but if you're if you get infected with it and you clear the virus you know like you have a cold the with it and you clear the virus, like you have a cold, the virus isn't staying. The virus goes away. You get rid of the virus. So if you are infected and recovered, we can't know that what had happened based on the basis of this test. Right. It's not that there are too few tests. It's that the test that we are using now

simply cannot pick up someone who has had the virus and recovered. Now, actually, in the last week and some, the FDA started to approve and there started to appear in the market another test called an antibody test. An antibody test checks whether you've been infected and you have produced antibodies in response to the virus. Those antibodies stay even after you've cleared the virus. So only in the last week and some, I think, has it become technically possible to measure how widespread the infection has actually been. And so the policy response, it sounds to me as though people are sheltering in place, ventilators are being produced, overflow ICU tents are being set up in Florida and Manhattan and out in Suffolk County, Long Island. Right now, the policy imperative, if you were advising Donald Trump, it would come down

to one word, test. Yes, representative test. Oh, explain that idea. Yes, because that's the other problem with the testing regimen, is that, I mean, not unreasonably, it's been reserved for people who are very, very sick, who they want to know if they're treating this virus or some other condition. And so the testing has focused on people who are very likely to have the disease. So this creates a bias in the testing in sort of in ways that make it difficult to understand what the true population preference. So what needs to happen is we need to have a population level representative sample, sounds really boring but it's like the critical thing, of the zero prevalence of the virus. How many people have had the virus and either cleared

it or had something else happen to them? The numerator is the number of deaths. The denominator is the total number of people infected. Jay, sorry, one more question. I know Rob and James both want to come in. So if the testing to this point has overwhelmingly been of people who present themselves with serious symptoms, to point what was this is the kind of anecdote you hear again and again but oh one of my wife's friends i'm not feeling well i called the doctor they said stay home i said i think i have the virus they said no no stay home we're not even testing you at the level that you're describing all right so you have to have

pretty serious symptoms even to get the test and if we are deriving a mortality rate based on that denominator based on testing people we already suspect have the disease the mortality rate that we have at the moment is either a meaningless utterly meaningless or be an upper bound it can't be any worse than that is that correct correct? I think that it's an order. Okay. So there's a disagreement among scientists about this. I'll just tell you based on my calculations what I believe. I believe that it's two orders of magnitude too high. Wait a minute. Two orders of magnitude too high? Yeah. So if Dr. Fauci is saying it's 0.7, you're saying it's 0.007? 0.07.

Now, I have friends who I respect, really smart friends, who disagree with me. And I have smart friends who agree with me. I think there's disagreement in the scientific community about this. And the only way to resolve it is a representative test of the population to find the population's error prevalence. We're basing policy on this. Now, one thing I wanted to address is that we've seen – I tend to not listen to a lot of, like, TV and things,

but, I mean, it's sort of hard to – Wise. Truth that you're a good man we have to we have to act in a cautious way right now in order to preserve the people to preserve lives and i agree with that in some in one sense but the thing i want to emphasize is if we create an economic depression there are going to be lives lost on the other side as well of that depression and not just in the united states a global global depression would kill, we'd have excess deaths

in basically every country on earth. We have a, I think what we're headed for is a global economic collapse. If the shutdown lasts, for instance, there's a group in England that, or in the UK, that put together a model that says we should be

shut down for 18 months i think they just took that back a little bit a couple days ago but i mean that that was their initial thing if we had an 18 month economic shutdown globally that i think that would kill more people than the virus would in the world um and and you can you can get so hold on you spin that out a little bit explain an economic shutdown one thing that i saw going around twitter yesterday i i i'm not as strong as you jay i actually have been reading twitter and watching cable news but one thread there's a study someplace by someone looking at excess deaths during the great depression in this country and surprisingly enough not all that many Wall Street traders threw themselves out the window.

The suicide rate didn't seem to move. It didn't actually seem to cause what a layman would ordinarily think he was looking for if you use the term excess deaths. So why do you think that a depression would kill people? I think it's, so I've actually written in this literature, it's complicated to separate correlation correlation causation to that literature. And so, I mean, I think it's hard to like, it's hard, it's hard to identify the effect in a, in a, with you put your hand on it.

Cause it's, these are, I think these are things that hard to, you know, hard to say it's like point to like a person dying of COVID, right. You don't see it, but I think it's, I think it's there. So let me just give you some sense. So like, I don't mean globally. Like, so when a country gets richer, its population tends to get healthier. I mean, the United States, I think,

would probably have some deaths, excess deaths. But if you look globally, many, many countries on earth depend on the global sort of trade, the economic vitality of the developed world actually supports the developing world. So I think you'd see many, many deaths there. And I actually also believe in the United States. For instance, during the Great Recession 10 years ago, there were these deaths of despair sort of famously. I think those are very,

very closely related to the economic slowdown, the loss of jobs and all those things. I think the evidence suggests that maybe just recessions in the 70s and 80s didn't have too many excess deaths, but the more recent recessions that are more deadly, even in the United States. Rob, James. Okay, I'm just trying to get back to where we were. We're talking about deaths. I mean, obviously, the collateral deaths would increase if the emergency rooms were full, too, right? So the policy of people staying home and reducing the number of people dying in hospital parking lots is probably...

Oh, no, that's a good... So I think there's several things you can do that are really, really critical. So one is, and I know for a fact that the federal government's working on this, because I've sort of helped a little with this, is they're trying to develop a... They have developed and working on refining a tool that identifies where hotspots are going to be relative to the capacity of the hospitals and other healthcare facilities in the area. And they're using the tool to say, okay, well, maybe we should move, we can move ventilators into this area. Like a heat map, right? Like a heat map? Yeah, exactly. And so that tool will

be enormously useful. I think as a nation, we have enough. The question is, when there's local hotspots, we need to move resources there as quickly as possible so we don't end up with an Italian situation where we're utterly vulnerable. I think this virus kills when a healthcare system is overwhelmed. And so to me, the key is let's not, we can't, we have to not overwhelm the healthcare systems. The strategy of a universal quarantine is not the only strategy available to reduce the probability of a healthcare system getting overwhelmed. There are other strategies we should be using. And so I think those, it's a range. Name one or two just briefly so quarantine is all we can do can i just ask two questions um uh what what is the real difference between us and italy i there's a lot between dustin so one is italy i

think it's nearly 20 maybe four close very close to a quarter of its population is elderly i think in the u.s it's about 14 this this virus is much more likely to kill you if you're elderly, which is a really unfortunate thing. Is obesity also comorbidity, to use a word that I learned a week ago and now pretend I know? I'm sorry, one more time. Is obesity also a comorbidity? I think diabetes is.

I saw some correlations. I mean, the studies are still, obviously, this is a brand-new disease in some sense, so we don't know all those correlations. I mean, the studies are still, obviously, it's a brand-new disease in some sense, so we don't know all those correlations. I think if you have underlying health conditions that weaken you or weaken your immune system, you're more likely to have a severe response to it. If you're younger, you're likely to have a much less severe response, although I believe, although I did not actually get my son tested in February,

he had a thing that looks to me in retrospect like COVID. I didn't know at the time. So one more. So and how, just to be sort of, because you're a doctor, so I've got to talk to you about that. How severe was the range of lung and respiratory damage that remains with people who recover? It depends. Maybe don't hit, they never have to go to the hospital or maybe they do but they essentially recover and come home and they're fine yeah i think i think the vast vast majority of people i think are again that there's this

clinical literature's early stages what i'm reading is that the vast majority of people recover entirely that there's no long-lasting damage there's some people who uh have a very severe viral pneumonia and there there might be some some longer, longer lasting damage. It's hard to tell right now, but I mean, that's certainly possible. This is a deadly, deadly virus. There's no question we need a serious response to it. OK, well, then I'm done. OK, we close our eyes. We're going to go forward nine, 10, 12 months. So at this point, the virus is it's not, you know, cutting through our cities and our towns. It's, it's endemic now to the population. We have a vaccine. Maybe we have,

we've done all this kind of testing. We have the, the antibody test. We getting all the data situation, normal, everybody's back to work. We're all going to face a whopping tax bill for the next 20 years, but so be it. Right. What do we what are the three things that we need to do, whether we have President Trump or President Biden or President Mickey Mouse? Or maybe that we all of the three, we prefer President Mickey Mouse. What are the three things or four things you think that we all need to do and and demand that our government of society do so when this happens again because it's going to happen again um we're prepared we're better prepared i i think we should have i think that this is not this is not a good president i think of how one designs a surveillance system the surveillance system we have now and some to some extent relies on on guess. We don't have a

very systematic way of surveilling the population to look for population prevalence of diseases. We get tests in and we say, okay, each test that the CDC sees for the fluid guesses that 80 people have the flu that weren't tested or for whatever reason the CDC didn't get that test. So they guess, 80 to 1, and they estimate the prevalence and the fatality rate based on that roughly 80 to 1 ratio. I think we need a more systematic way of surveilling the population for diseases and new diseases. We need to rethink how we do that. It's not a question of money.

It's a question of ideas. It might be more expensive or it might not. I don't know, I haven't priced it out. But I think a more systematic way of surveilling for these so that we have a, so we're not left in the, I mean, I think the biggest problem with the policy responses have been is, and it's completely reasonable, it's true around the world,

we don't know the key number that would allow us to decide what the right policy response is. so there's a lot of argument over over things that we i mean there's not knowable until you actually do the do the work to get the thing so what we should have is a system that allows us to get that number much more rapidly when these kinds of things happen but that system would have to go around that system would have to go around the chinese communist party right i mean no look we we survey the population all the time like we have polls i i ignore all the calls whenever they ask me but i but i but we get polls all the time uh we have a no i i guess what i mean is that that

we would have better numbers have a better idea about this virus if we had been if we were preparing for it in january yes that's true and that's nice thing we have us if we had a system like a disease surveillance system that was more systematic and population representative then we would have a better number in place I mean that the problem now is that we have a system it's not it's not terrible it's one of the best systems in the world actually actually. The problem is that there are population representative samples that the National Center of Health Statistics draws, but they don't extend it to, they don't have sort of real-time capacity to add all these kinds of, you know, these newly developing conditions rapidly into them. I think

that's what we need to develop. Jay, may I ask about if the following metaphor is valid or invalid? It's a Cold War metaphor. And by the 80s, we had in place, or at least we told ourselves that we had in place enough satellites watching the globe that we would know within seconds if there were a launch of a ballistic missile anywhere on the face of the earth. And that set in place a certain series of protocols under which the military would have to decide whether it was an enemy weapon, where it was headed. within 90 seconds, the president might receive a telephone call. Thank goodness nothing of that kind happened, although we were watching missiles launching all the time. Is that something like what you're proposing here, that we can

develop a system that watches hotspots as they occur around the world? Or am I dreaming? Is that impossible? No, I think that around the world we'd have to have negotiations across the world. But I don't see why this wouldn't be something the entire world would want to cooperate on. But certainly within the United States we could have such a system. And that wouldn't be seconds. There would be fights among geeks like me who track these things. But that's okay. I mean, I think there were fights among the geeks who tracked those things during the Cold War. But something closer to the right data would greatly resolve the policy problems that we faced. And then not just us, but everybody around the world

faced. All right. And then I, I'm sorry to know, you go, I have one philosophical question, which we can ask. For sure. I want to get Rob and James back in. So, Jay, several times you've said, if the mortality rate turns out, well, you gave us two possibilities. One is that the thing is quite deadly, and the other is that it's up to two orders of magnitude less deadly than is now generally supposed. And you said you would treat these two models, these two realities, once you knew which one was the reality, in different ways. What is the different way of treating the reality

if it turns out that it is indeed much less lethal than it now seems or supposes, or we suppose it to be? Yeah, the idea there is essentially to, in the long run, something that Rob actually said to get herd immunity in place. So everyone, essentially everyone's been exposed in the long run because you can't prevent that from happening. Work very hard to develop a vaccine so that you prevent the really, really ill from being, I'm sorry, vulnerable from being, getting the thing. Make sure healthcare systems have in place ventilators and ICU beds and everything you

need in order to care for them if they do get sick. That's the approach. I think if I'm right is probably where we're headed. If the other folks, again, people I respect and very smart are right, and it's very, very deadly, but it's relatively contained, then maybe like quarantines, maybe even a universal quarantine might be warranted, depending on exactly how deadly it is. And so if, this is my last question, because I really want Rob and James to get back in here. You and I see each other for coffee from time to time. I'll get more questions

answered from you that way, Jay. But as matters are unfolding right now in real time, what's your sense of how quickly the testing will begin to get done, testing of the kind that you consider necessary to decide which reality we're dealing with, and how quickly can we make adjustments in actual policy? The president said in an interview the other day, he's hoping to have the country raring to go. That was his phrase, raring to go by Easter. That's April 12th.

That seems to suggest, in his mind, there are going to be at least some places where people ought to be able to go back to work. Is it your sense that we can get the testing done that we need, analyze the results, and correct policy in a matter of two or three weeks? Or is that just dreaming? The test is going to be, I've been working very, very hard to get a prevalent, seroprevalent study with my colleagues in the field. We've been working really hard. I think two to three years of work have happened in two weeks. Really? So this has been a remarkable event for you in the profession? It really has. I mean, things have happened that I didn't think were possible in an ivory tower.

I'm hoping to have, I'm working on studies that I think will be in the field next week. We should have an answer, at least in Santa Clara County and L.A. County, and then actually with a group that Major League Baseball has offered up a lot of its tests and its back office people and minor league affiliates to do some testing nationwide. So I'm working on those three things. I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece, which, Peter, you helped with. That has led to a remarkable outpouring of people wanting to do this kind of study and work.

Oh, that's great. So that piece had a result. Yeah, I mean, I don't write op-eds. I haven't participated in these kinds of conversations a ton because I think it's better to just say, you know, I do my work and I don't want to be political if I don't have to be. But this time, I think it's been very productive because it's allowed me to be connected with people I would never imagine would connect with me. And they all share the same goal.

We need to do this testing. I don't know about April 12th. It's hard to say. I mean, it depends on what we find and how rapidly. to settle these disputes about what kind of reality we're dealing with here, that the testing will begin producing valuable results in a matter of weeks rather than months, is what I guess I'm trying to go for. I think it goes okay. I mean, there's still a lot that can go wrong, but if everything goes okay, I think that's the right answer. That's what I'm hoping.

Yeah, and I think I don't want to make any guess or comment about April 5. I just don't know. Doc, we're going to go to some questions from the audience, which is burgeoning, I'm sure, with all kinds of stuff. Put you on the spot. And I want to note that before when you mentioned that the people who responded to this and survived did not seem to have any lasting ill effects, it's our job to catastrophize as much

as possible i saw a tweet that said no people who survive young people will have scarred lungs and smaller testicles which just terrified an entire generation of people so let's get let's catastrophize every single let's address the testicles at least here jay right in matter of fact there is the the title of this podcast is let's address the testicles at least here, Jay. Right. As a matter of fact, the title of this podcast is Let's Address the Testicles. I'm Peter Robinson. We're going to go to our calls. Doc, Don Tillman, you're up. What would you like to ask, Doc Jay?

Hi. Can you all hear me? Yes, we can. Excellent. Welcome, Don. Hi. So in this country, we have like wildly varying population density. Silicon Valley, where some of us live, it's about 3,000, 4,000 people per square mile.

Manhattan's around 70,000 people per square mile, I guess tripling when people are working. It seems to me that it has to be a very different approach in the way modes of transmission and all between, you know, across the country, depending upon the population density. Secondly, and related to that, how how does um as as modes of transmission go how about uh daily commutes uh over mass transit possibly lengthy uh close packs and uh subways and such how much of that is contributing also a high population density contributes to spread of a disease that has a high doubling time because you just get more exposures to people over time. So does globalization. Lots of travel also contributes. Basically, almost everything that we take for granted in modern life contributes to a spread of diseases like this. We're going to have them again.

There's just no doubt about it. We've had at least, let're going to have them again. There's just no doubt about that. We've had at least, let's see, there was SARS, there's H1N1, there was whole series of these, there was Ebola. I mean, and I think this will happen over and over again. It's a feature of globalization. It's a feature, actually, just it's a feature of the interconnected world. And it's a feature of the fact that even even rural areas you are connected to people so it's going to spread the question is how can we how can we manage it uh i mean because the other choice is just to give that up and i think that would also be catastrophic that's true um when you mention rural areas though and you can put the entire

country on a lockdown and it's hard to imagine that you're going to keep a couple of guys in williston north dakota from putting out some chairs and sitting and enjoying the sunset james can i make a confession so i'm i'm in my office at stanford which is uh supposedly on lockdown uh i'm supposed to be sheltered in place i uh i uh in the initial days i i ignored that because I could not possibly work from home. I now have, I was going to show you guys the letter. I have an official letter allowing me to do this. So it's all legal now, but Peter's it's done because he doesn't know it by my letter. It says I'm essential, which is an amazing thing to me. Well, what we know is that Peter's's inessential that's the most important thing

he's saying i have an essential i have an essential letter too when my wife came home as i noted in a post on ricochet she came home with a letter saying that she was essential and it was like being in casablanca with a letter of transit this is this document that said that we could go out amongst the world of course everybody can go out go out to shop. Everybody can go out to get essentials. It's very strange. Stay where you are, except for the times when you go to this concentrated place where everybody's going to. Rob, you had one more.

I think it's possible. I mean, I think eventually it breaks down. I mean, the first day I came, there was almost nobody on the streets. It was surreal. There were, like, red lights. I mean, I rode my bike in order to make sure that I avoided running into police asking for my letter. Now, as I've been biking, there's lots of people wandering around. I think eventually there's diminishing returns to universal quarantine because people really can't stay just indoors all the time.

No, here in minnesota for example dogs are getting more walks than ever but when people pass nobody passes each other in the street with the same sort of bonhomie that we used to we cross the street we go to the middle of the street for the first week however uh people averted each other's eyes now people are looking up and they're smiling and they're waving and we're here we're still here we're out and about we're going to get through this we got one more question from Rob was going to take a really stratospheric looking down. I think Bob Armstrong wants to say something and ask questions. Is that right? That was precisely what I was going to say. We've got a Bob. Bob Armstrong. Where are you

and how are you doing? Good morning, gentlemen. I'm in Charleston, South Carolina. I hope you're well in your various locales good to hear from you what we hear the emergency equipment in the back rob of course new york is still new york james still absolutely so i'm waiting for the cab to drive over the plate of steel that's been sitting there in the street for the last you know 35 years kank kank bob charlottesville uh what's your question for the doc? So I have been seeing these detailed reconstructions of timelines of events. It sort of reads like in cold blood as you see the second by second bits of information that come out. How realistic? Well, hold on a second, Bob. Great. You mentioned that because Peter, Rob's glasses are so Truman Capote that it's been all, it's all I can do

to, to, to not make that point. But anyway, so you're saying we've got the tick tock and in cold blood, go on. Um, how realistic is it with a, a novel, a novel disease like this, uh, when it first presented for the clinicians to realize that they were not dealing with something typical. I understand that the initial treating doctors thought it was an incidence of SARS or something like that. How quickly would we expect someone to recognize this is different, this is something we haven't dealt with before, this needs to be reported up either to the World Health Organization or to the national level things? I think some of these recriminations that are coming out are unfounded

as to how quickly people can actually respond to new things Yeah, I mean, I think like I've read some of the accounts from the Chinese doctors who were trying to say look something Something's going on here. This is really weird You know what we're seeing doesn't look like the flu people aren't testing for the flu But they're dying with this DNA gun or RNA gun coming out of their other lungs so coming out of their lungs. So I think that the clinical people treating it in China probably very quickly knew this was something different, right? This wasn't the usual viral pneumonia people were used to. I think it was spreading before that. It was very likely it was spreading

before that. And it would have been very difficult to pick up when it was spreading before that. It was very likely it was spreading before that, and it would have been very difficult to pick up when it was spreading before that. But I completely agree with you. This is a very fast-moving situation, especially from a medical perspective, deriving solid knowledge about what's etiology, what's the right treatment, how to control all those things are difficult things that often we debate forever, right? So what's the right way to deal with

diabetes? We're still debating exactly. I mean, it's still an active thing. How do you treat cancer? These are active things that take forever. That's what we're used to being able to do is like have forever to deal with them. But when we have a conditional where it's really really rapidly moving you gotta have i mean i i have a lot of sympathy for the folks who are uh responding at first um it's gonna be it's gonna be a long battle i don't think an 18 month 18 month quarantine is warranted i just i really just don't i think that would be catastrophic in other in many many ways and i hope that rob's vision i think that rob's vision of what the long-term is, is the most likely, is my sort of best guess

long-term outcome. We'll go to Rob for our last question. Yeah, so, I mean, this is it, right? Go ahead. Yeah? Go. Yes, go on. So, I guess what I would say is the,

I'm still sort of thinking about the future. What do you think is going to be different about the way we treat diseases, infections in the future? And I guess I'm leading it in two ways. One is that we're now sort of as a layperson, I'm now discovering that there's sort of two sides to every outbreak or every disease. There's the studying the illness, but there's also studying the wellness, the wellness part, you know, but doctors have always said to me, hey, we know, we don't know how many people have colon cancer. You could be, there could be a billion people dying with colon cancer every day, or, you know, a lot of people, and we wouldn't know it.

They're not dying of it. So how important is it for us to sort of study that part of it, which is the hardest part, because it's going to be the biggest part. That's what that antibody test is essentially, testing people who aren't ill. Yeah. I mean, I think that's going to be an important part. I mean, for any disease, you want to understand the full range of effects, how to, who's vulnerable, who's less vulnerable. It's going to, people will be studying this for decades. I mean, longer. So as a doctor, if you could,

Conrad Hilton, right? The guy who wrote Hilton Hotels was on to the Tonight Show. And Johnny Carson said to him, hey, listen, you got all these people looking at you, you're a successful guy.

You want to give anybody some advice? And he turned to the camera and Hilton said, I only have one piece of advice for you people. Please put the shower curtain inside the tub, which, you know, like he had a moment, he took his moment, right? So you're a doctor, you're a researcher, you know stuff. What do you think, what should we be doing now? What should we be doing 12 months from now? What should we just be getting used to doing

forever to do our part when these things happen? That's a really good question. And I mean, I think I have to say I've been amazed by the extent to which people view the order to stay in place and they take it as a civic responsibility. I mean, I think that's in some sense admirable. On the other hand, I don't know. I mean, I think that's in some sense admirable. On the other hand, I don't know. I mean, what I worry is that the scientific profession, we have this like aura of authority around us as if we know. And what I've seen is that within this, like this, it's really easy to abuse that. I mean, I want to be completely clear about what I don't know.

I think that the scientific community should have been clear at what it didn't know when it started saying we needed a complete shelter-in-place order. That policy has, within it, embedded certain values in addition to scientific knowledge. So I think it's, I don't know, I don't have a clean answer for you, Rob. I think it's got to be something in between. There's two conflicting thoughts

I have in my head at the same time. One is, yes, listen to the authorities if they're telling you to stay in place, use the elbow bump instead of the hand. That's good. On the other hand, be skeptical. I mean, and ask the people who are making these life-changing decisions on your behalf for you.

What do they really know? Doc, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. We've learned so much and just scratched the surface, and I'm sure we'll talk again. You'll talk with Peter, or we'll have you on the show or something, or the great resource. It's been fascinating and comforting to talk to you about what you know. So thanks. Good luck to Stanford. I know. Yeah, I got a little dry cough.

I know. I was just going to say, as long as we got a doc here, when I raised my arm. Jay, you did so well. The next cup of coffee is on me. You know, Rob made a great point, as he always does, with the Conrad Hilton story. And it's instructive because if you ask Conrad Hilton about shower curtain placement, he's going to tell you what's best for the hotel. If you ask a fireman what's best about building construction, they're going to tell you don't go up higher than four stories and don't make everything out of wood. If you listen to a doctor about these things, you're going to hear a series of prescriptions.

And so every expert has got that piece of knowledge that we all should take into account. But if we did everything according to what the most anal retentive, reductive, restrictive experts said, we would have a severely diminished world. I mean, when I see a lot of the things that I see on Twitter, and a lot of the panic, a lot of the horror, and a lot of the catastrophizing, I have to sort of point this through the perspective of people who are there and seeing it perhaps not as, you know, it might be in a larger sense. So Rob's right. But here's the thing, though.

What they did was they came up with a shower curtain that was both inside and outside. So in the old days, the shower curtain was just either or. Then they came up with one. Maybe the hotel industry did it that said this part will be inside. It'll automatically be so so that we don't have to nag people about this because people don't care that water gets out. It doesn't bother them. It's not their place.

So it was one of those situations that evolved so that everybody could get what they wanted. Nobody got everything they wanted, but it worked out so that everybody got most of what they wanted. It's sort of like having a bunch of credit cards and going back and forth between them in order to spread your debt around. Not all of your credit card companies may get all your money at the end of the month, but everybody gets a little bit, and so everybody's happy, and you struggle and stagger along. Well, that's really not a very good way to run your finances. If you're carrying revolving debt, that means you're not paying off your card every month, and you could be paying thousands, thousands, thousands of dollars of interest in every year that you just, frankly, you don't

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We can go big and talk about the civil liberties implication of all this. We can go back to what Rob said before and said it's not really a partisan thing. And I get that, especially when you're talking New York with a partisan divide between Republican and Democrat. You know, you get a Republican in New York, it's not exactly the same as a Republican down south. But there is going to be, at the end of this, when we have a conversation about what we've been through, isn't there going to be, or am I just being hopeful, some discussion of the fundamental ideas about how to organize societies and which models work best? One of my favorite tweets from Molly Jong Fast, I'm probably pronouncing her vowels wrong, over at the Bulwark, was saying that, so let me get this straight, because our president doesn't know how to president.

That means that the states have to do this all themselves? Well, that sort of, yeah, is the way the system is set up. Are we going to have demands for a more authoritative, robust federal government that is able to snap into place and do these things? Are we going to empower the states more? Are we going to have a blend? Are we actually going to talk about the difference between the two parties when it comes to local control and overriding federal authority? Because right now, we're giving the feds everything. Yes, we are. Peter?

Well, all that is true. As you brilliant quip, it used to be, this is what you yourself said, James. What was it? Two podcasts ago, it used to be that war is the health of the state. Now sickness is the health of the state. Did I say that? I like that. You did say that. And it was pretty good. Yes, exactly. I think I've already stolen it, James. You can't use it now. That all that is to come, I guess all that is to come for sure um it just strikes me as remarkable that governors don't governors don't seem to cherish their independence from the federal government gavin newsom

and andrew cuomo every second sentence they say is we need federal help we need federal aid part of it is just asking for money of course course. I guess that's what politicians do. But part of it is asking for direction and coordination. And it just surprises me that politicians are, so many politicians are so willing to surrender their own prerogatives. I guess it's easier politically if you can blame somebody else. The other bit of this that is a little disconcerting to me, a lot disconcerting to me, but the time to argue about it is probably a couple of months off.

I saw a brief press conference by Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, immediately after the Senate had voted this $2 trillion bailout stimulus package, whatever you want to call it. And McConnell was very pleased with himself and pleased with the Senate. And he said, in the course of one calendar quarter, we have gone from the most partisan activity a Senate can undertake, impeachment, to a vote of 100 to nothing to help the country oh and of course yeah what what a stunning surprise that they all came together surprise that they can exactly right of course what unites them is spending other people's money all right i chatted yesterday with john taylor we recorded

an uncommon knowledge on zoom john taylor the economist my friend and colleague here at hoover and i just put to him how much of this $2 trillion is actually going to be useful and how much of it is just pork? John's feeling was there's a lot of pork, but yes, we still have to pass the best package we can get that looks as though it was the best package we could get quickly. Got to do it because there's unemployment benefits in there. There's loans to small business. It's important for the economy. But yeah, there's a lot of stupid stuff. All right. So we have the government exerting new powers. We have a tendency to look to Washington to take the lead. And we now have discovered politicians have rediscovered the joys of giving away vast sums of other people's money. All these

are bad habits. All these are very bad habits that's all that's clear to me right now yeah well they're not new habits either they're not well um bigger new newer circumstances that tend to reinforce them not what you can get 100 senators to vote for something and vote for spending money then everybody gets what they want and and some people i mean the brazen brazenness of the Democrats in the House anyway was, I mean, in a way, it was like incredibly impressive. The idea that some poor intern had to write in English, type it out, somebody type this and make an argument why the Kennedy Center needed $35 million to help fight the coronavirus. That to me, I want to meet that intern.

That intern has skills. That is a very brazen, outrageous, but yet somebody at three in the morning typed it out and said, should we just give the Kennedy Center $35 million and just say it's for corona? Absolutely, go right ahead. Windmills, windmills, definitely windmills.

Windmills and everything else, just because we're spending money, let's spend it all. There was something sort of like the magic of the government at work right then that was almost purely, the pure distilled, uncut heroin of big government and everybody's there. That said, obviously there are things

that need to be passed. I would just say that we need to think, you know, American leadership is one of those things that's a big question mark now. But it seems to us that leadership in the world or the leadership in the world. It seems to me that the you know, the United Nations is essentially this giant organization designed to to to adjudicate poorly, in my opinion, land disputes. You know, the borders here here, the border's there, the refugees go over there.

That's kind of what it does, right? That's what it's been doing for the past 100 years anyway. Those disputes still exist, but it seems like if we're going to give the UN any new brief, which I can't believe I'm arguing for, it should be to intervene early and gather information on outbreaks. You know, the WHO went to Hubei and asked questions and they got answers.

And so they just said, well, I guess the Chinese are saying this is true, then this must be true. And we may need to have some kind of international order to go and get us the data when it starts to happen in a far-reaching province that's far away from us now. How do you do that without force? Well, you do that as a... How do the WH guys use their rifle butts to kick down a door and get the scientist who knows the skinny when the Chinese government is lying to them? You make it clear that that's the price of admission to the United Nations.

And if China wants to leave the United Nations, they can. I mean, either we have an international body that's going to give us useful information, do something useful or not. This seems like it'd be kind of useful. And the second thing I think, in addition to all those things, you know, besides the, you know, getting the information information is that we need to, I mean, we need to sort of swallow our, our, um, our woke, uh, multicultural attitudes and say, if you're a member of, if you're in a country that has wet markets or live animal markets, you need to stop that. I mean, I, what is the price to the, what is the price to China to

getting out of the UN? Oh, huge. Right, yes, I know. But you mentioned disputes, territorial disputes. Do you think that if the United Nations very sternly sends a very strongly worded letter that China is not allowed to occupy those islands in that little dotted area that they sort of expanded to, that China will say, you know what, you've got a point. You're the UN. I don't know what we were thinking. We will withdraw all of our territorial objectives and we'll also give Tibet back.

Sorry. Sorry. You're right. You're right. That could be true. But it would just be one more arrow in the quiver. It's not if we're going to have an international body, it should be doing something that is relevant to 2020, which seems to me to be delivering, delivering internationally accepted data from an early outbreak so that other countries can prepare. I mean, if we'd started preparing in January, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I agree, but it was G-I-G-O from the start that was part of the problem. That's true. The U.N. won't do it, though. The U.N.

You know, Rob, I'm just suggesting there's all this real estate on the East River, and what they're doing now is essentially zero. So maybe they should be doing some, you know. What was Turtle Bay before they got there? Turtle Bay was just kind of a little neighborhood, a bunch of neighborhoods. It was a slaughterhouse. I mean, the U.N. was building the grounds of an old slaughterhouse. If you look at Tudor City, which is this huge complex of apartments. Rob, you know what, right? No, I know it. My brother used to live there.

Right. Right. But look at the back of it. The back of it has no windows. The back of it has no windows because it looked down on such a bad industrial slaughterhouse area that when they built it, they turned their back to it. And so now you have this prime real estate that doesn't even have river views, uh, whether or not it was more efficient and more useful when it was actually provided jobs and meat, we'll see. But again, the UN is only as good as the people who constitute it. And it's not a collection of people. It's a collection of government. What I mean is that if we're going to have international organizations and we're going to have a national defense in the same way, it should be targeted towards relevant.

I agree. I agree. If we're going to have a federation we should have one that's the you know we want if we're going to have a federation we should have one that behaves like one not one that is made i agree too but this is links and and romulans who've got their own agendas and you can't trust them hopefully john i agree i agree with with your aim i just think the united nations is. It's been around for 70 years, and it's done very little, and there are good reasons why that is the case. So set it aside. This is going to be, my suspicion is, the way to get something useful done

is to admit, once again, the indispensability of the United States of america there is if if some sort of early warning system gets built that's genuinely useful it'll be because the united states takes the lead and works with its allies to create a system just as we did with the general agreement on tariffs and trade that the chinese wanted into nato right all these structures we have to take the lead. The Jay Bhattacharyas of this world, brilliant, entrepreneurial, humble enough to follow the facts, are overwhelmingly in this country. And that's a great point. And Rob Long is going to tell you exactly what he thinks about Peter Robinson's statement there. But first, a word from our sponsor. Hi there, folks. You know, we're talking about pork here. We're talking about spending. It's been reported that Americans are overspending on their car insurance by over how much? It's almost impossible to tell because the teleprompter speed is set at four instead of five. So in other words, if Americans are overpaying on their

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fast form, and they find you the best rates and coverage in your area, in your state. Like that, it's fast. It's amazing. TechCrunch calls The Zebra, quote, kayak for auto insurance. And if you use kayak, you know exactly how much fun and easy that can be. The best part, it's completely free. You can save up to $670 a year using TheZebra.com. So how much can you save on your car and your home insurance? Find out. Go today and start saving at TheZebra.com slash ricochet that's thezebra.com slash ricochet spelled t-h-e-z-e-b-r-a dot com slash ricochet happy our thanks to zebra for sponsoring the ricochet podcast uh rob we were talking before about your admiration for the person who managed to insert 35 million dollars for the canada center yeah um i don't think that actually they had to

make a completely a compelling case for it they were just tossing. I mean, these guys were going through the financial resources like somebody at a Wal-Mart scooping everything out into their cart, pushing it up. This is their opportunity to get to get everything. I just mean that somebody had to type it. Right. Somebody did. So is there going to be at the end of the is this a political point that somebody that can be used in the next election where trump can say look i had to sign it because i wanted to get the country back in the footing and if i didn't the markets were going to tank we had to do it but look what this is who these people are every single thing is in their careful there james careful there james do you know who endorsed money for the Kennedy Center? The

president of the United States during one of these press conferences. He said, oh, they've been having a hard time at the Kennedy Center like everybody else. They need a little money. They just had $250 million in improvement. I know. Of course, he said he's a New Yorker. He's a spender. He's a builder. But I'm saying it's still a point that can be made. Not by him, probably. Yes, maybe. No, but if they push him, if they tell him this is a point that he needs to make for his bright dividing line, it would be a good thing. Twixt him, perhaps, and Biden. Because the other side is now getting up their courage and saying, like Yang, like Bernie, like the rest of them, see?

The money's there. Yes, that's true. We've got the money to spend on these things and by saying that they ignore the fact that no the money isn't there it either has to be taken from there or it has to be invented are you asking are you making a political point because if if if we're in november and the economy is back to where it was before uh both sides will claim that they did it because they'll no no one's going to be running away from this trillion dollar trillion and a half dollar bill they're going to be running towards it can be hugging it so hard it's going to be the the trump

administration called the donald trump uh prosperity restoration act and it'll be and then democrats will call it the you know the uh the pelosi biden save america bill that's they'll be and then Democrats will call it the, you know, the the Pelosi Biden Save America bill. That's there. They'll be naming it. They'll be they'll be claiming it for their own. No one's going to be running away from this. If it works, they're going to love it. They could absolutely love it. There's zero evidence that any Americans ever, whether they're conservative or liberal, don't like it. When the government spends money, they love it. They just don't like it when the government spends money on you. They love it when they spend money on me. I don't like the federal government. I don't want it to. I don't. The federal government. I don't want it to spend money on me.

The federal government's going to give everybody a check for $1,200. This is literally buying votes. That's what they're going to do. You think people are going to say, oh, you know what? I appreciate the $1,200, but bad. You shouldn't have done that. No, people are going to love it. People love it.

Donald Trump, Republican president, got elected and is very popular among Republicans. And he's explicitly said, I'll never touch Social Security or Medicare. Those are the only two things that really matter when you try to bring the national debt down. So there's no we talk about it, but we don't actually want to do it. And so this way, it's a this is a win win. Right. For a politician. I get to give you stuff. This is this. I think of this as the the LBBJ test. Excuse me. That's allergies boys. Not, not COVID. Yeah. The Lyndon Baines Johnson test campaigning for president in 1964 in Providence, Rhode Island, Lyndon Johnson said, this is a quotation. You can find it in Robert Cairo

and it should be engraven in the mind of every conservative. Lyndon Johnson said to the crowd, quote, we're in favor of a lot of things and against mighty few. And anytime, anytime you see the government acting on that attitude, as it just did, you ought to be at full alert yeah i would also say one thing is that i keep getting texts from uh uh i guess an anonymous i'll keep him as an anonymous friend of the podcast uh saying actually there are windows riverview windows in tudor city and he sent a picture of those windows yeah no it's pretty much the whole building he sent a picture of it um so i'm not sure where the slaughter i I think, I don't know where that,

maybe the slaughterhouse was done by the time Tudor City was built. Who knows? See, James, just be careful because Rob has friends who live in the river building looking down on Tudor City. Then I'm quite wrong, and I may be referring to another building

in the Tudor City area, or maybe I'm just making stuff up. The problem is, and this is the problem, you know, used to be one day you could say something like this and nobody would bring it up and challenge you and you'd be regarded as being smart. But nowadays, of course, with Google, you know, everybody can find everything in just a second, which leads us to our member post of the week. And it's so very nice to be able to turn from my error into something else,

which would be this member post of the week, which I, who, who was the author? Ah, it's killing me. One of our favorites, but he wrote, my life is a Google end user. And one of the reasons that I liked this was because he started out by talking about mad magazine in 1952, 53, and who were the five original artists. He could name them all. He could ask Google, and Google knew the same amount of information as he did, as he found that he was working on a paper of great complexity with historical details that needed to be

checked, that in the old days would require tromping down to the library and going through the card catalog and finding it, that he could, a wealth of information presented himself to him now just the touch of a thing so a praise exact i mean we get uh suspicious of google and we should as any big institution on the other hand it has provided for us an amount of information that's unparalleled in human history and uh something that we have to use wisely. So that's our membership post of the week. But I got to tell you that everything's been popping on the member post because that's where we get together to talk, to yell, to scream, to play music, to tell jokes and all the rest of it. And it's not available unless you join Ricochet for a very

small amount of money. So if you're getting that 1200 bucks of free government lettuce that Rob Long says we're all happy to get, carve out a little bit and hand it over to Ricochet to make sure that you can participate in one of the more interesting forums the Internet has to offer. Wouldn't you say, guys? Yes, I totally agree. I thought I was on mute for a minute. Wait, am I? No. No, we can hear you.

We can hear you. And pretty soon, Rob rob the people who did this will hear you and if those people who did this are chinese is that is that uh is that a racist to say china's china went back according to somebody who's uh monitoring their their media and is rewriting the web pages uh doing the i mean there's literally 1984 stuff where it comes down and you change what the newspaper of the past said and put the other one down the memory hole uh just changing the dynamic so it's no longer the wuhan flu or the chinese flu but it's just this sort of thing that happened to the world somehow what i was about to what i was saying when i was on mute is that james lilacs is now keeping a diary on Ricochet and you get to read about the fact one of the most fascinating lives by one of the most fluent gifted amusing writers going

Peter that is worth more than the price of admission right there right that's very true the fact that you said that it was one of the most fascinating lives puts all the rest of you superlatives into question. Well, you know. If nothing else, it's my ability to make slightly interesting something so banal and pedestrian that it rises to the level of. He's the Samuel Pepys of Minneapolis. Actually, that's beautifully put. That is beautifully put. Timeless.

Except that he's not dealing with his maid in French. I'm doing it and I'm not complaining endlessly about piles and wind. Yeah. I mean, I have my own blog at lilacs.com, the bleat. And I do that, but I put at the end of the night after I put my blog to bed,

sometimes I'm sitting up and I finished my column or something. And I just, I just got something to write about and I've enjoyed putting it on Ricochet. And eventually it's all going to go to my blog as well. I'd love to put it in my paper, but there's no room, believe it or not, because news happens so fast that it just keeps knocking on the front page of our paper, of our online site, which is astonishing. I mean, we have so much traffic and there's so much stuff coming and people are hitting it so much. It's bad for news businesses right now, because if you look around a lot of the print journals, it's not an ad to be seen. It's just poof, that business vanished. Like everything else,

at the end of this, every single industry of note is going to come out in its own way, transform. It may be, for example, hospitality. You check in for your room and at first, for the first couple of years, the guy will just pull up the gun to see your temperature. But then it'll be built in to a very nice thing in the back of the, you know, the hotel front desk that automatically just looks to see what your temperature is. That's, I mean, if there's anything dystopian that's going to come out of this, it's endlessly varied ways in which they're going to be able to conceal temperature monitors in every in every airport they're going to do that i mean they're already doing that in some airports in asia they'll do it here i hope they come up with something better than what they're doing now which is this sort of forehead gun so you really stand in front of an official who points a gun at your forehead and takes your temperature which is just the the sheer weirdness of that is is is know, maybe, you know, some viruses are better.

How will they prove that they disinfected the airline seat after the last passenger before you got on? Because in the backs of people's minds, they're going to be very leery about climbing onto airplanes until they can be proven, right? There will be new tech. And from what I understand, there's new ways of electrostatically, that's the word that I'm using without understanding it, like comorbidity for Rob, where they're able to just walk through and instead of the old spray, and wipe it down, that there's a more quick, massive way to do it. And if I'm making this up right now,

it'll be a reality in six months to a year or so. I mean, you've got the Dyson factory in London, which is going to turn out 10,000 ventilators because they've got some really canny guys who got together and said, hey, we make things with engines and air that suck and blow. Can we do ventilators? And they can do ventilators. The ingenuity of people is extraordinary. The goodness of a lot of people that we're seeing, are we seeing riots? Are we seeing panics? Are we saying, I mean, in certain parts of the country, people are behaving like ours, but they always do. What you're seeing here and I see is a certain level of kindness of people stopping to thank the grocery store workers and really appreciate that to go to the local

businesses and get some takeout food. So they don go under, to buy a gift certificate and rip it up, to give an extra tip to somebody, to just be nice because this is utterly novel. And for them to put the word novel in coronavirus is kind of helpful because it does sort of set the story. Either you understand how new this is or you use the word novel in another sense and sit at home and write something. And in any case, we're going to come out of this

in a fascinatingly different way. This was a great test. And Rob said something about three, four weeks ago. He said that this is a test. This is a stress test. And I think, Rob, you meant because there will be a worst case flu at some point. Yeah. This is a good indication of how we react to that. Do you still stand by that? Or do you think that this is actually that? No, I don't think this is that um i think this there's there's a worse contagion gonna happen unless you know let's we we get the we we we swallow our our pc and get the chinese to close those markets but there's going to be worse stuff happening and we just have to have this in the back of our mind this is what we're going to do

when it happens and we do it quickly and we hope we squash it. But yeah, this is, I don't, I mean, I think that the world is just getting smaller and smaller and smaller and, and the dirtiest parts of the world are getting closer and closer to the cleanest parts of the world. And people who live in rich, clean places tend not to wear masks and we tend to touch everything. We think like, and we don't even think about it really.

Every now and then we use the Purell or we go on a cruise ship, you know, cruise ships always have it for the norovirus and for their E. Coli outbreaks. So we just have to get used to that. And we, and that's the thing that we're just, that's what, not only will Corona be endemic in, you know, 12 months, but so will our renewed sense of how to keep these clean and off of this. That's the thing.

Yeah, it's not trouble for parents because adults in New York treat the world, you know, they have to stop treating the world like the Guggenheim Museum where everything's pure and they can't touch anything and start regarding the world as Chuck E. Cheese in which, you know,

every surface has been contaminated by filthy little Reese's Munchies. Yeah, exactly, right. Peter, some closing words from you as well? I have. I guess what I'm impressed by are the stories that haven't been written yet, but that we get the sense are beginning to percolate. And that is of the remarkable innovation.

Jay just said he's been working. Jay just said he thinks two or three years within some slice of the medical profession, two or three years worth of work has been done in the last couple of weeks. Again, I don't know the details of this, but the idea that they can now use each ventilator for two people, they can adapt the ventilators, that the regulators have run the tests and approved it, that helps reduce the load in emergency rooms right now, that the Dyson's people in, what, 10 days? The Dyson geniuses who invented the Dyson vacuum have invented an entirely new, very low cost, easy, quick to produce ventilator. This is pretty remarkable that the good bits of America, the free bits are really swinging into action.

What I like is the fact that Peter Robinson's background interacts with his headphones in such a way that when he moves his head, he looks like a Klingon in a way. There's something Star Trek alien about him. It looks like a hair that's back there. Rob, meanwhile, is in crystal clear shape. We're all admiring the background. The cherry blossoms are in bloom. Move over slightly. What is that poster?

Is that a Chinese Communist Party poster? That's a North Korean propaganda poster. Right above the bar, actually. Above the bar. I'm not sure I know what it is. It's a big fist smashing a guy with a USA helmet on it. I have a bunch of them. I've got one, which is my favorite favorite, which is at the framers now,

because I brought them from, I've had them for since 2006. Since I almost made it to North Korea, since I actually technically did make it to North Korea. And it's at the framers now. And it's like this, this hand pushing back at these sort of like, you know,

horrible, you know, greasy looking Westerners, like the evil american and stuff and it's a woman a north korean woman put her hand back and it's from i think it's from the early early 21st century it's like in 19 it's like 2000 2001 it says say no we say no to sexual harassment it's like wow you guys think we're running out of propaganda at that point if you're that's your big propaganda point but i just love it so i have it i gotta pick it up when this is all over i don't want

to put it oh yes and mail it to the biden campaign so they can deal with that interesting that we haven't even talked a jot about that that's for another podcast uh you know to that glorious future when we can go outside things are open the economy starts work. We can spend money in restaurants if we dare to go there. And Rob will know it's great when Rob gets his picture back from the framer. Exactly right. Exactly right. On Ricochet Podcast, we talk about two kinds of framers, the ones we revere and the ones who've got Rob's picture hostage. So we'll know that the economy's working again. That's how we'll know. And we say, Rob, we're doing the Zoom. Show us the picture. And Rob says, oh, we won't be doing Zoom anymore.

Exactly. But it's been fun. I've enjoyed it. And I hope you all have as well. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 400 and whatever, moving our way to 500. Thanks, Rob in New York. Thank you, Peter in Los Angeles. I'm James Lalex here in the middle of the country.

And we'll see you in the comments as ever at Ricochet 4.0. Bye, guys. Next week. Next guys. Next week. Next week. Next week. Wash your hands. Wash your hands. Sitting in my room Hunting a sickening tooth Sitting in my room

Something to do soon But no one think of them The problem's just piling in They got complaints about everything It's us against them It's us against them It's us against them. It's us against them. It's us against them. They just want to worry.

That's not what any teacher had to do. They just want to be somebody. Maybe they should try to be somebody. Ricochet. Join the conversation Outro Music