"Don't Let It Go": Selfish Distancing
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for my browser to show me that I am there and I just sent out notifications on social media a couple seconds ago so I'm going to wait for a couple people to get in before we start in earnest. Yes, I'm coming up on YouTube now. Nice to see just started streaming.

And it looks like we're up and running. So when you guys do get into the chat at YouTube, when you're watching me live, go ahead and let me know by typing into the chat box that you can hear me okay. I'm not hooked up to the headphones because, again, it's a solo show today. So welcome. This is Don't Let It Go. And the title for today's show, I am provocatively titling perhaps, but I've got different angles on this topic, conversation.

called selfish distancing, selfish distancing. You keep talking about social distancing. And I even saw someone on Instagram this morning had a meme called it socialist distancing.

socialist distancing. Yeah, because if you think that everybody should, you know, keep their distance, then somehow that is a socialist measure. Is it a purely socialist measure? Or could it be selfish for all of us to want to keep our distance for a limited time? That is the title for today. I do see that people are starting to come in over at YouTube. So come on over and let me know that you can actually hear me and not just see me. I can see that you can see me, but let me know if you can

hear me okay. Type into the chat box. It does require you to log in, but I do want you of course to be logged in over at YouTube please so that you can like and subscribe to the channel as well, not just join me live. So again, go ahead and type and say yes I can hear you Amy. I can't just see you, I can also hear you. And let me know that we're good before I get started.

Also, let me know how you're doing. How are you guys doing out there? I saw on my social media feed yesterday, someone putting in the post, the status update, that he didn't know anybody personally who had or didn't even know anybody who knew anybody personally who had yet been affected by coronavirus. And that was somehow supposed to be

persuasive of something. I don't know. Now, of course I do happen to know personally, not as a close relation, but personally someone who is battling coronavirus right now. And that's David Latt from above the law. If you go ahead and Google, you'll, you know, see some news about him. You can find him in news under Google. Good. Okay. Stream looks solid. They're saying over on YouTube. So thanks for letting me know you guys and welcome. Uh,

Yeah, so David, 44 years old, he had asthma as a confounding factor, but at the same time, the asthma, I think, was only exercise-induced disease.

And notwithstanding the asthma, he had completed two New York City marathons, 44 years old, super smart, awesome, nice guy. I had done an event for his book with him at Southwestern Law School a few years ago, really liked the guy and stuff, and we were following each other on Twitter. So not really close, but knew him and met him and interacted with him quite a bit around this one book event that he did. Great.

Great, nice guy. And he is on a ventilator in a hospital in New York City. The last thing I heard is that he's been still on the ventilator since Saturday, largely sedated, and they're trying some sort of experimental drug therapy. They didn't say which of the ones that they are trying on him, but they're doing that right now and they're going to know within a few days.

So, hope, right? And, you know, I don't know if David will ever end up watching my show. That would be pretty, you know, egotistical of me. Yes, come watch my show, David. He's going to have much better things to do once he gets out of this. But sending, of course, best wishes for him. So I do know one person, you know, consider yourself lucky if you don't yet know anybody personally. I do have friends also on Facebook whose family are

are affected. I haven't met them in person, but there's, you know, you're starting to hear little bits of, of friends of friends and things like that. So it's not some hoax. I mean, that's what I wonder. Is that the implication of those posts where they say, Hey, I don't know anybody personally. Is it that it's all hype that there's some sort of hoax going on some massive conspiracy? I don't believe any of that.

based on what I know. So, you know, kind of throw that out right away. If that's your argument for that, we shouldn't do social distancing because you don't yet know of anybody personally who has it.

No. Now, it also happens to be the case that the so-called HIPAA laws in the United States usually will prevent news about particular individuals from getting out. And so, for instance, in Orange County, California, they had the first reported death due to coronavirus. And all they tell you is that it was a man in his 70s.

and that's all you know you don't know which city you don't know anything and so you know again the chance if they did announce his name for example as they sometimes do with murder victims and things like this then you might know but somehow HIPAA HIPAA is a joke because you know if you think your privacy is actually protected vis-a-vis government then you know uh

In that situation, no, it's not because really HIPAA, the HIPAA disclosures that you read basically say that the medical offices, the doctors, the professionals will protect your privacy to the extent that government allows it to be protected. So they get whatever information they want about you. And then in terms of

getting the information that we might like to know about, for instance, you know, when they give the stats about community acquired coronavirus, community acquired, are they able to trace it to certain restaurants or stores or events or whatever that had gone on in the certain areas?

you know, in the certain area. Chandler over at the chat at YouTube is saying there's a young girl with no pre-existing conditions that died in LA. I had not heard that. I did not hear that. What I did hear, there was a 21 year old

who died in UK with no preexisting conditions. Robert in the chat room says, what's the difference between this and other viruses? He says, simple. The numbers of cases and fatalities are doubling every three days. And he says, project that out for just a month. Yeah. Now we don't know that it's going to continue to double every three days. That's not doubling every three days in the

Every area. So it's not necessarily doing that every single place, but it's doing it enough places and there is so much unknown about this.

That, yes, my provocative title I'm saying it is, I think right now, regardless of whether governments coming in and doing mandates and they're doing power grabs. And, you know, don't get me wrong, I admit that our government has created in large part the situation by denying the severity of it and keeping all of the horrible FDA and other regulations in place.

with respect to testing and everything else, that government has been a huge part of the problem and that some of the politicians seem to be really almost gleeful in their power grab. Newsom in California is just...

horrible to watch. I mean, I see the little video clips of him that are around on Twitter, you know, and on Twitter, if you don't click on them, you don't hear them, you just see the guy. But, you know, watching him is, he's so smarmy and everything. He just seems to be like, oh, yeah, I'm in control and I'm in charge and I'm going to just, you know, lock everything down and

No. So there's, you know, the power grabs, but at the same time, even if our government was not mandating the social distancing, I would say there is a strong selfish reason to want to do it for a limited time.

assuming certain circumstances, one of which we know is definitely true, that there's a lot we don't know about this virus, that it's not just a virus that poses a risk to the old with certain pre-existing conditions that you could point to. There was someone who was saying 90% of the people in Italy had a pre-existing condition or 99%, the ones who died,

as if, as if because they have preexisting conditions, somehow it's not bad that they die because of this virus when that death could have been prevented or avoided. No, this is tragic, you know, and, you know, pointing at all of these other things, I think a lot of us point at these other things and say, oh, well, therefore, I hope if I don't have

this other preexisting condition that I'm going to be okay if I get this virus, but we don't know. I mean, so there's, there's so much that we don't know.

Just on an individual perspective, you would want to avoid getting it for yourself. And there is not testing out there and things for, you know, we're not getting adequate information. Some of these places where I, you know, I tell you that in some places the stats don't have it doubling. Why is that? Is that because the cases are not actually doubling or is it because there's inadequate testing there?

in those areas. Now in Korea, they're saying in the Seoul district government texts us sometimes to say that there's an infected person in the neighborhood. Yeah, so one question that I wanted to explore a little bit today is something that I've heard about from two different sources. They were saying that part of the success

of South Korea is that they tested, of course, there was also, you know, widespread testing, but the testing was done in a very informed way based upon this mechanism of tracking people who were infected by the cell phone location data. And so that you would get a message on your cell phone saying, hey, you were at the same place as this infected person at such and such time. And so maybe you need to

you know, go and get yourself tested as well. And so that they actually targeted the testing based on what they knew about the shared location of people who had been infected. And that is an interesting thing, you know, is this something where you'd say that people should just be able to opt into something like that? Is it something where you'd say, okay, because there's all these out of control vectors everywhere going on, people spreading the disease,

largely oblivious, that government would even have a role in saying, okay, cell phone companies roll this out. So that's a sort of thing that I'd be interesting. Do I think it's selfish, as Chandler in the chat room, to self quarantine in an attempt to avoid the government taking more extreme measures? Or is that pragmatic? Okay, well, let's talk about because we want to separate

when we're talking about what is selfish, you know, the personal from the political. And so are there selfish personal reasons to want to be distancing yourself from everybody else engaging in this social distancing? Is it selfish on a moral level given everything that we know today? And then second, are there things that we can do

that can make this more of a selfish exercise, regardless, right, of the fact that it's just that we're avoiding either catching or spreading the disease. So those are the sort of ethical questions. And then we could also talk about the political, the political situation, of course, can play into part of your ethical decision making, as Chandler implies here with the question, but also what,

Today politically is justified. Now the political question is something that I talked about a lot in the last Friday show that I did with James Valiant. You can find it here on my YouTube channel if you haven't seen it yet. I called it Imagine All the People COVID-19 Test It, right? That my...

you know, argument there. And, you know, I'll repeat the essence of it, because I think it gets misinterpreted. My argument is that today, there seems to be justification for at least a limited period of even mandated social distancing by the government. Now, why is that? The

The situation as we have it today is, as I see it, has been, and I think other people agree to John Stossel's been tweeting about this and everything else. The situation was made much worse than it needs to be, first of all, by government intervention. And so it's the case that we haven't had the widespread testing that we should have and would have if the

you know, rains, the regulatory rains have been taken off. And even in the UK, now the story that I saw this morning is that within days, they're going to have these at home testing kits

why in United States, it's supposed to be a bastion of freedom and limited government. And supposedly they're letting go of all these regulations. Why aren't we getting those? Why is, and why didn't we get them so much sooner? So we've got this terrible situation where there's a whole bunch of people who are either, you know, suffering from the disease or they're unwitting vectors. A lot of people don't really know what the risk is to them and everything. And, and

The only way out of the current situation, which also involves, unfortunately, a lot of intervention in our health care system.

and therefore an atrophy of the capacity of our healthcare system, a less agile healthcare system can't respond to an increase in demand as good as a free market system might. All of these things together make it such that if we don't flatten the curve, as they call it, there is going to be a horrible demand placed on hospitals and healthcare workers such that

you may not be able to get the care that you maybe think you're not going to need, but maybe you will need. And second, also all of the doctors and the healthcare workers, imagine the horrible situations that they're going to be put in, the types of decisions they're going to be asked to make on the fly, plus trying to keep themselves safe. And they're going to be overworked and stressed and everything. And then you're telling them to make these impossible choices. Yeah.

So that's a situation that we're in. And I say within this unprecedented situation, a limited lockdown.

is an actually justified measure right now. You want to prevent those kids from stupidly going out on the beach in Florida and having their spring break and saying, oh, they don't care if they get infected. You know, tell that to, you can't tell it to the 21 year old in UK who has now died of the virus or the 17 year old in California who has that I know of. And maybe there was a younger girl as well.

You don't know. There's so much that you don't know about what the effect of this is going to be in any given person. The symptoms, they're learning about new symptoms all the time. Is it that you have to lose your sense of smell or not? You know, what are the leading symptoms? Um,

It, you don't, there's a lot that you don't know. What we do know, if we look at an Italy, for example, is that there is a strong likelihood that if the curve is not flattened, we're going to have hospitals overtax. And then you say, okay, well, Italy's got the over older population and blah, blah, blah. How about in United States? We have a bunch of people on the so-called standard American diet.

Right. And the standard American diet will cause what they call metabolic imbalances in the body and all sorts of chronic disease, right?

That I don't know that you can always predict what the effect of the virus is going to be in a big population on what we call the standard American diet with all sorts of refined carbs and processed foods and everything else. This is a big unknown. And in Italy, yeah, or maybe they have older people and there's a lot of more intergenerational population.

Maybe those were factors there, but maybe they also have a diet that consists more of whole foods and unprocessed foods than we do. So every place in the globe, you can't say, oh, it won't happen here. We don't know yet. I think there's enough unknown that you could say just out of concern for your own health.

And then also for concern about having the hospitals and the doctors not be overloaded. There's a good selfish reason to do it. There's also, I think, a good justification for a limited lockdown period. Now,

That being said, there are certain, in my mind, preconditions of this, right? You'd say, okay, government, if you're really going to give us a lockdown for a limited period that's supposed to have this effect, and it's going to be worthwhile for everybody because you're going to see that the numbers are actually going to flatten, that the hospitals are not going to be overloaded, that they're going to actually ramp up the

types of cures and treatments that they're working on so that the people can actually avoid being put on ventilators in the first place, like poor David Latt in New York. Government needs to be doing its part. And what I've been trying to do

You know, because for me, part of making all of this sort of a selfish endeavor is to try not to focus too much on the news. I've got to focus to the extent that I think it's worthwhile, but not. But when I see a piece of news that talks about government still failing us, notwithstanding the fact that they're locking us down and doing all these things, then I try to speak out. So, for example, if I see this story this morning about the UK is going to get

the at-home tests within days. And I'm not getting the same news here. In fact, the news that I got the other day was that the FDA is blocking the use of at-home tests here.

Right. When I see that, I'm going to comment on it. You know, I'm going to go out there and say, hey, and I actually tagged Donald Trump, say, hey, why aren't we having this here? This is part of the deal. Yes. Tell us we need to shelter in place or stay home or whatever we want to call it.

I think for a limited period of time, that is a very selfish thing to do to avoid the mass amount of death that we've seen in Italy, which is a real risk here. And also, just think about your own health that you're protecting by just staying home and being sensible as much as possible during this limited time period.

but it's a deal. The government's got to do its part, and I don't see that they're doing that. Another piece of news that bothered me this morning is that the governor of Nevada just blanket prohibited the use of chloroquine, the drug, on coronavirus patients in Nevada. Now,

Is there something that he knows that the researchers that we've heard about in the news don't know that they've said, look, this is 100% cure. Some places have been saying in Europe, it's 100% cure. Now, what I do understand from a friend is that the chloroquine or the other hydro chloroquine, there's a couple different formulations of this quinone, quinine drug.

I've heard that it is related to Cipro and the antibiotic fluoroquinone, both of which are implicated with strong side effects of some kind. And the other thing that we do know is that

There's a chloroquine fish drug formulation that one couple decided to take. I'm not even sure that they were infected with coronavirus and they decided to take a fish drug formulation prophylactically. And at least the husband died and then the wife ended up in critical care from self-medicating on this stuff. So, you know, is this a drug to be taken lightly? No.

Is it a drug that a governor of a state should take completely off the table and say no you can't have this. No, I submit that this is a power grab by a politician who thinks you know he wants to keep control of this. I am sick of politicians, saying that they're going to take care of everything and be in control.

you know, Cuomo in New York has been terrible this way. Right. So you get the headline at New York times that I commented on the other day and it was Cuomo mandates a 50% increase in hospital capacity, you know, capacity in the state hospitals. He orders this to happen. And, you know, my response is what ordering is going to make it. So Cuomo, no, you know, um,

First of all, maybe we could argue that the regulations that made a cap on hospital capacity, that those were unjustified, and so that it's good to lift that.

the regulations, but then if you then mandate that suddenly they're going to increase the capacity like that, that is not going to make magically appear whatever resources are necessary to increase the capacity. And more importantly, perhaps,

If you look at the situation with coronavirus, it might be more important than in the normal hospital operating case to keep people distance from each other. So, you know, an order from a governor is not going to create the resources magically to make it so and it's not going to make the practice safe. You cannot do that. Who is an arrogant politician who thinks that he can just order something and then it's going to happen. So,

My, you know, position in a nutshell is that, yes, I do think a limited lockdown is justified. I can't tell you exactly what that is. You'd have to speak to some experts. I'd like to speak to Amish Adalja about, you know, that what is the justified period of a lockdown right now. But, you know, that could actually change. And one thing that I thought I saw from Donald Trump that seemed reasonable the other day was a tweet where he was saying, you know,

Okay, let's give this 15 days and keep looking at the data each day and then see. Now I'm fine with them saying, okay, we're going to start with a 15 day lockdown. Our criteria is X. And then we're going to see as time goes on and I'm going to keep you updated on the information.

Yes, a limited lockdown. It's got to be a shorter period of time because we don't want to destroy the whole economy. I don't think we should be looking at months based on the information that I have. But again, I'm not an expert. I would talk to an expert like Amish Adalja on this question of how long it should be. But given the context that government screwed up, what I would like to see from the politicians is we're sorry, we screwed up.

We have to have a limited lockdown in today's situation because of the tremendous danger and that the hospitals are going to get overloaded, et cetera. But it's going to be this time period to start.

And this is the effect that we're looking for. We are doing everything possible in terms of getting out of the way of private solutions to the problem to make this time period worth your while, to make it selfish for you to want to stay home right now because it is going to improve your

tremendously the amount of safety with which you can go out into the world after this period is over, etc. They need to reassure us of that, and they are not. The FDA is keeping the clamp down on at-home kits. Governors are taking it upon themselves to say, well, what treatments can and can't happen in their state? Cuomo, he says, we're going to be using the new plasma, blood plasma treatments in my state.

Now, as I understand it, the blood plasma treatment probably has fewer side effects than the chloroquine. And it seems very promising from what I've read that you could use the plasma of a person who had already been infected. And so there's antibodies in that and put it in the person who is sick and help them get well more quickly. That sounds like a very promising therapy.

The problem is, is that plasma donations have to come from individuals. And as I understand it, the plasma donated from one individual can save two people.

So where are you getting all this plasma if all the cases hit at once? It's nice for a governor to say, hey, you know, I'm so fancy schmancy and I'm so good and I'm looking after my people. I am having plasma therapy used in my state. But again, an order or permission is not going to make the resources automatically appear. And so, you know, do the numbers. Certainly, if I

I had been infected and you gave me a test and you said, Hey, you you've been infected and you, you know, you're no longer in danger of getting sick anymore. Would I donate plasma to help save two other people? Sure. I would do it. Plasma is not easy to donate. It takes some time. I've never donated plasma before. I've donated blood many times, but that takes, you know, what, 20, 30 minutes at the most with the whole prep and you sit there afterwards and get your orange juice and cookie and stuff. But plasma, as I understand it to donate takes time.

I can't remember at least an hour, maybe a couple hours. And you have to sit there and they take it out, you know, your blood out and then they put it back in sans plasma. And, you know, it's, it's, it's a procedure and it can't be done frequently. So you can't have, you know, the same person, you know,

like do it all the time every day and keep saving other people. You've got to have a number of recovered patients all willing to do this. You can't make those people magically appear like that. So there's a lot that is unknown that needs to be done. Let's have this lockdown for a little while, but let's make it worthwhile. And that's what I want to see from the politicians that they're doing their part, that they're making it worthwhile.

Roger says they should be promoting behaviors divergent from one's regular habits, such as reading more at home to provide selfish motivation to stay at home. Now, notice that a lot of people in the private sector are indeed providing more selfish motivation for you to stay at home. I've been starting in the last several weeks. It just so happened to be a coincidence, a meditation practice.

And you can go find it, Emily Fletcher. She's got the book Stress Less, Accomplish More. And then she's got Ziva Online Meditation. She's been out there having group meditation events and she's offering massive discounts on her thing to try to get people into this sort of practice, which will help

handle all of the stress of the day, but plus perhaps establish a healthy habit for the future. Reading would be, reading more would be the same thing. There's a lot of online content that is being offered to you. And in fact, I'm going to be selfish right now. I'm going to plug my own online content. Let me see if I can find a link that I'm going to go ahead and drop.

for you in the comments over here at YouTube live and I'm going to also put it in the squib material that's right under the video for people who check out this recording later but those of you who are live you're going to be able to see

the link in the chat in just a minute or so. Zoom, by the way, is a wonderful service. I mean, I've been on Zoom for a while in order to bring you a show like this, but they have really stepped up to allow a lot of things to take place online during this time. So kudos to this company. What I'm offering tomorrow is a free meeting slash webinar on

where I'm going to describe a course that I'm going to offer starting next week. So let me drop the link where you can join the free webinar tomorrow. You get it. You have to register for the webinar. And the reason you've got to register for the webinar is that I'm going to be using the information, the email that you provide through the registration in order to communicate with you. Josh says, Courtney hacked my account. Okay. That's fine. Yeah. Um,

Yeah, Josh is going to argue with me about the selfish distancing thing in a bit. Maybe now if he's actually here online. So anyway, I've got the link over in the comments on YouTube. I'm going to go ahead and also put it into the video. Let me see if I can do this while I'm even live. Maybe this is really, really fancy schmancy. Okay, I just put the link.

into the video details, as they call it, the description on YouTube as well, so that people afterwards, when they're watching me, they can go ahead and... Oh gosh, let me see if now I can see myself in the studio. I've lost myself. I can't see myself online. I got to get back to the chat, you guys. Let me get over to you. Learning all of this on the fly. I'm going to become...

a pro after a while at streaming to YouTube, right? Okay, now I should be back over here and

Here's my chat. Okay, there we are. Zoom has saved many office jobs, says Chandler. Yes, it saved all kinds of jobs. Yeah, so what am I doing? I'm going to be offering an introductory logic course. And as you'll hear me explain tomorrow, there have been a number of things that I've seen online that are inspirations for offering this right now. It's something that I think we could all use. You know, not that I think that

sort of deductive logical reasoning is the only thing that we need right now, but it is certainly something that we would like to keep our grips on. As I've seen, you know, again, from a governor who thinks he can order something and make it so suddenly to other people who are actually having the same sort of tired kind of debate styles out there where they say, oh, well, you should listen to me because I have way more Twitter followers than you do, etc. I've seen a lot of this.

Dr. iScope says so much for fancy schmancy. So what do you mean by that, Dr. iScope, so much for fancy schmancy? Fancy schmancy meaning the sort of fancy work tradition where you go in and you're dressed up in the suit and everything. And so now we're working from home and we could just basically work in our pajamas if we wanted. No, this is not my pajamas. But what do you mean so much for fancy schmancy?

I'll wait and see, but let's see what else. Robert says we should allow non FDA approved products and practices, just as you can buy you all listed electrical devices at your own risk. I think you meant non you all listed Yes, yes, we should be able to look at this out at their own risk, you know, this is the thing so you know I posted for example, the article the other day where they were saying that the FDA had banned

these at-home testing kits. Remember, there were four different companies. Among them was NERCS and EveryWell, and there were a couple other companies who had already been mailing out testing kits to people, at-home testing kits for COVID. And, oh, someone said you're editing while on screen. Yeah, that's not very fancy. That's right. Um,

No. So, and of course now I'm interrupting as I'm doing this, but yeah, so we, you know, we had four different companies ready to give those at home testing kits and you know, the FDA said no. And they said, moreover, anybody who's already sent in samples and stuff, you can't even test them. They just shut it down entirely. And now they're going to be offering at home testing kits in the UK. Right. I think that that is,

a wonderful thing, more information, the better. But anyway, so I put this up on social media and then I have someone, and I think he might be some sort of medical professional who was saying, well, I think people are better off without these testing kits anyway, these at home testing kits.

And why? Because I guess the testing kits show only an active infection. And so maybe the information is going to be worse than useless or whatever. As if people aren't capable of understanding which piece of information you have.

are getting, right? Which piece of information are you getting, right? Are you getting the information about you've been exposed to the virus at some point in the past?

Or are you getting information about there is an active infection right now? I think people are capable of understanding which of those things is true. And maybe ideally what we're going to get is both pieces of information, right? You've been exposed in the past, but you do not have an active infection right now. And suppose you've got those two pieces of information right now. Suppose you were able to do an at-home test today.

And you found out you'd had been exposed at least seven days ago, because I understand that's what those antibody tests say, that, you know, sometime, seven days or more in the past, you've been exposed. And then suppose second, it says you do not have an active infection right now. If you look at the standard incubation period for this, that would mean you stay home for another week out of an abundance of caution.

And you cross your fingers and, you know, take your antioxidants or whatever it is that you think you're doing, you know, to get your rest and go outside and walk and get your sunshine and all those things to try to, you know, hang on for another week. And then you say, wow, okay, probably I now have some immunity and I'm okay. So that if I go out in the world, I'm not going to

be at risk of getting sick. I'm not going to put anybody else at risk of getting sick. This is powerful information that we could use to, yes, get the economy going, get people out of the lockdown. This is what we should have. The fact that the testing companies that have come online so far are offering only a part of the puzzle, a piece of the puzzle,

Let them do it. Let the market decide and you know so I'm arguing with this person I'm saying you know my point is that the FDA is still clamping down, whether you think this is the ideal test that everybody should want or not is beside the point. The point is that the government needs to finally get out of the way and realize its mistake.

Yeah, and Robert says, and some idiots will use that freedom to do more harm than good thing. Yeah, you will, he says, and Robert also says you as you allow more freedom, almost everyone will get better results, but the most reasonable people will get the most benefit. Yes, yes.

You know, get out of the way. We want both pieces of information, obviously, but for someone who's currently sick with something, for example, that is a very valuable piece of information. And let's get it to them as soon as possible without making them have to go to clinics and jump through the hoops and, you know, suppose, suppose you're feeling sick and you go to a clinic and

The procedures are pretty good, but maybe you don't want to overwhelm the clinic staff if you're not that sick, if you're not somebody who has different types of pre-existing conditions, etc. You just want to know, is this the thing? Do I have it right now? And that would be very useful to know.

you know, what is the case for sure is if you get that piece of information, yes, I'm infected right now, that once you ride it out for a couple weeks and you are no longer feeling bad, you could say, look, I had it. I've got some immunity. That's the, you know, that's both pieces of information, right? If you have the active infection. So I don't see arguing against

a particular type of test because you think it's not the ideal one. It's giving people some information that they didn't have before and let them decide whether they want to shell out, you know, the 80 or 130 or whatever many dollars that it was.

don't, you know, argue in effect like, oh, well, the test would have maybe done more harm than good. And so therefore, the implication is that the FDA isn't so bad for shutting down or banning these tests. The principle of government control is what got us into this mess. And, you know,

government control is not the way out per se. You could say a stock gap measure of a certain type of control maybe is justified, but it's only if the government is, you know, kind of bending over backwards and apologizing to us profusely and at the same time doing things very differently so that we say, okay, we will, we'll comply. We want to comply because we can see the value behind it. And right now I'm saying, okay,

dubious about the value behind it. Even so, because of a lot of the selfish reasons, am I going to be staying at home? Yes, I'm going to be staying at home for a while until I see what's going on. But, you know, again, we have to really watch. So the other things that I am not pleased with in terms of government not doing its part

Let's take a peek at those over at New York Times. I understand there's been a deal made. Senate moves towards vote on sweeping $2 trillion aid deal. Senator Mitch McConnell called the measure a wartime level investment in our nation. Number of cases have reached nearly 60,000. So I don't know as part of the $2 trillion relief package yet.

Are we all still getting checks? We all should be getting packages with these at-home tests. I think in lieu of a check even, you know, you'd say, when I said, why don't we get a test and not the check? Some people put out there on Twitter, well, I want the check, send me your check. You know, if they send out the check, would I cash the check? Yes, I would. And this is for all the reasons that Ayn Rand talked about, social security and everything else. You know, if

There's going to be inflation that's going to happen because the government is just sending everybody a check, which is basically a useless measure. Am I going to suffer the inflation without at least protecting myself by cashing the check? No, I'll cash the check. But really, we need the test. We really need the test. That's the thing that we most need. Two trillion relief package. And what is it going to be? Is it going to be a check? No.

And if so, what's the check? Is it $1,000? Is it $1,200? Stronger worker protections, et cetera, et cetera. You know, one thing that I realized recently in California, you know, we have in California something called AB5. It's a piece of legislation that went into effect at beginning of this year. And it clamps down on the so-called gig economy issue.

And as I understand it, there's a lot of gig economy that is perhaps necessary during this lockdown period. And of course, there are a lot of people who just make their money in a sort of gig type economy. They're freelancers of various kinds. And, you know, they're shutting down on this. This is illegal at the same time that really this is the way that a lot of people could be making money by doing sort of, you know, freelance jobs from their own home.

Yeah, I'm not getting much details on the deal. I can't keep up with the sort of bailouts and things that they think they're doing. All I can figure is that if they have reached a deal, there's probably a pile of unnecessary pork in it. And that even the so-called direct aid that they're talking about is probably not including the test packet that it really should, etc. So...

Yeah, I'd like to see. Do you guys know? Are we all getting checks? Are we all going to get test kits? That's what I want to know. And certainly, you know, by doing this, I don't think that they're going to make the coronavirus situation necessarily any better. They can, you know, talk about they've got money to buy all these things in the world, but the supply chain is not going to miraculously close.

sort of manifest itself overnight. And the other things that I'm hearing too, so for example, we're in a situation now where we are dependent on China for a lot of the supplies that we need, the test kits and the masks and all sorts of things. And there was one story that was verified by somebody who happens to have contacts, I guess, in Czech Republic that

China sent a whole bunch of test kits to Czech Republic and it seemed like a good thing. You know, they're being very generous and sending all these test kits, but the test kits didn't work. And so it makes you sort of doubt the value of

any sort of trading dependence on China, not just because of the defects in the goods, but also because China has been doing all sorts of maneuvers lately to threaten the withholding of supplies. So, you know, the other day, one of the things that I saw out of Cuomo was he was saying that the, you know, the factories should just make more masks and make more protective gear. It's very easy to do, he says.

And, you know, my answer is, sir, you make it, you cannot make it happen just by ordering it. There's a lot of people who need to do this. There's a whole supply chain. There's raw materials and people who all have to work and feel safe doing their jobs.

So, you know, I'm not seeing the government uphold its end of the bargain, which I think is a necessary component for all of us to feel like it is completely 100% fully selfish for us to stay home right now and to listen. What are they doing in California, for example? They have in California actually shut down the beaches already.

Shut down parks, hiking trails, mountain areas where people would like to go get out. You know, what is the benefit of California anymore? Like I just talked about AB5, which they put into effect at the beginning of the year, shutting down on freelancers and the gig economy and the people who get special exceptions to AB5 are the people with the most income.

clout and lobbying power and everything else. It's truly disgusting. And then tax taxes are out of control here.

all sorts of government boondoggles like that so-called high-speed rail project that they wasted tons of money on. They wanted and have tried and probably at some point they're going to succeed at having socialized medicine for the state of California. What are the benefits? I mean, the main benefit of being here is, you know, it's the beaches and this sunshine, the wonderful climate that we have. I'm looking out at sort of a partly cloudy day here, but I've

felt relatively lucky during this time period because it seems that almost every day I've been able to find some small chunk of time where it's sunny and I can get out and walk and get some vitamin D and

make myself a little bit healthier, which is one of the things we can do during this time period. And what does state of California do they shut down people's ability to go to the beach. Now you don't want the beaches to get overcrowded. You don't want people to be foolish and get within the six feet and everything else when they're at the beach.

But if you truly cared about the citizens, you'd say, we're going to leave these areas open. It's good for everybody to get out and get the fresh air, but we will take some measures to make sure it's not overcrowded, for example. That would be appropriate. But I see these politicians, they're just, they're almost gleeful in trying to

you know, shut everything down and say that they're in control. And only they have the answers as to which treatment should be allowed, which tests should be allowed, etc. And the hope is that they're, they're going to learn. What are you guys doing during your kind of time in Roger mentions reading more? So have you been able to establish a habit of reading more?

Are you watching any good content? Are you taking some of the museum tours that have been able, you know, made available online to you? I know that Robert is starting to offer shows of his own, and I bet that's fun. I'm not seeing people in the chat. I'm wondering if I'm having a, it says I have an excellent connection over here on YouTube. What are you guys doing during this time? Hmm?

I know some people, for example, if you join at Rob Wolf's Healthy Rebellion, he's got a challenge pretty much every day out there. I think he calls it the boredom busting challenge, but sometimes it'll be some sort of a physical challenge. Do 100 push-ups today, or sometimes it will be...

you know, something more mental. So learn something in a new language. And he's alternating between mind and body challenges to keep people going over there. In addition to giving a lot of good information as he sees it about how best to weather the virus. And again, that information is changing daily.

Bread baking therapy says GM. Yeah, I'm kind of off bread completely myself, but I would love to smell a loaf of fresh bread baking. I bet that would be a nice therapy. I'd have to try to resist eating it, but that does sound good. Playing in the backyard. I've been drawing more, says of few words. So a few words. Thank you for chiming in. Even if you are of few words, drawing would be good.

Oh, someone retracted bread baking there. I think it's wonderful. It's not the thing that I eat, but I would love to smell it. Also indoor stuff like playing video games and watching my favorite TV shows. Yeah, you can binge watch all sorts of things. Set up a Zoom account, virtual dinners with family and friends, giving virtual guitar lessons, says Robert, and virtual karaoke last night.

Maria says, I'm going cray, cray, crazy. You know, if you could think about, and it's a challenge, right? For some people. So some people now suddenly they have kids at home besides, you

also being at home and not really planning for this time period so it's hard to juggle in terms of schedule maybe for some people but if you can do it and then you can start getting on to a project that you maybe thought you always wanted to do and now suddenly you've got time for it it would be wonderful Enric says he is 3d printing objects for his house

And then he also got a channel called Criterion to watch classics that he's been meaning to see. Those both seem like really great uses of time. I was listening to something that Emily Fletcher, again, she's a meditation instructor who's out there on, you can find her if you Google her, Emily Fletcher and Ziva.

And she put a video out yesterday, an interview that she'd done with this guy who's a therapist. And he was asking very provocative questions about how could you turn this around a situation in which I think many of us are in a justified way, feeling fear and anxiety, not just because of

the actual risk, but because of, you know, the difficulty of tearing ourselves away from the news feeds. And a lot of time, I think the news feeds that we're getting are

Either purposefully or not, you know, it's hard to tell which right are they curated in such a way that they actually make you more anxious and worried about this. It's hard to say. But, you know, how could you turn around this, especially if, say, you're an atheist and

And you can't just say, okay, well, I'm going to trust that there's a plan from some sort of a higher power or design of the universe or whatever that makes it this way. How can you look at this time period and say, okay, it's selfish for me to stay in for a while. There's a lot of unknowns, but I'm going to face this with equanimity and turn it around to actually make this a positive period in my life. Would it be wrong?

The guy asked, and I'm paraphrasing him, but he asked a bunch of very thought-provoking questions and emotion-driven.

like emotion revealing questions or emotion inspiring questions he got, he asked, right. You know, would it be okay for you to look at this time period? Could you give yourself permission to look at this time period as an opportunity for growth for you personally? And if you did, what could you do, you know, to make it that way? Is it okay for you to do this? What if you did do this? And, you know, it keeps kind of pressing along those lines and, and,

it's not easy, right? And what you probably do have to do is a strict diet of this. We need to keep up with the information to a certain extent, but you know, you've got to stay away from the feeds if you can, so that you, um,

you know, have space to focus on a positive direction, a positive direction for growth. So as for me personally, I have a schedule right now such that it's a little difficult to carve huge chunks of time out. But what I decided to do after I waited a certain amount of incubation time

period of time to feel like it was safe to do so is say, okay, I'm going to do this intro logic class. And if you followed me for a long time, you know, that I had been putting feelers out about doing an online course for quite some time. And I said, okay, well, this seems like the perfect opportunity to do it because there are a number of people who are stuck at home for some indefinite period. Did you want to see this water bottle like this?

It's pretty, right? Move it over here. Move it over there. Okay. Sorry. This is a very informal show today. I'm sorry about that. No, so I'm, you know, I wanted to do this for a long time. This is the time. This is the time for me to go ahead and offer this. And as I said, a number of the things that I've seen in those feeds that I couldn't help but look at many times per day, a number of those things inspired me.

offering a logic class that we do need sort of reinforcement and informal logic training now more than ever, and also formal logic training. But that's the kind of thing that I want to do that I feel because I've taught that class a number of times at a university that I can offer to the world. It doesn't take

a Herculean effort on my part because it's something that I have done before. I just haven't offered it in an online format. And so I say, okay, take the leap. Yesterday, as I said, I made that calculated decision

decision that, okay, if I look at all the statistics about the incubation period, I'm probably okay now to commit to offering this class and hopefully not getting sick during that time period. I mean, those are the sort of things we have to think about a little, but if you think, okay, you know, you've been through your time period, you know, you're probably okay. And you can embark on a project, just do whatever you can. Yeah.

Robert asked a great question. He says, what would have to happen for you to be able to look back on this spring with no regrets? Right.

I mean, suppose, yeah. What would make this a powerful time? Yeah. He's got a lot of great questions. So you, you should go work for this therapist, Robert, and feed him some more questions to ask because those are exactly along the lines of, of this therapist. Josh says if Amy is going to be keeping in favor of doing a lockdown, she should do reaction videos to ARI on your own videos, which don't say that. Why Josh, do I have a duty to react to ARI on your own?

It's a question to ask. I don't think I do. I think I can focus on the positive and just make my own argument, which is what I'm trying to do here. This, you know, immerses me in a conflict that I don't want to be immersed in. I'm just doing my thing. So no, I won't be doing reaction videos. What else are we doing? Reading We the Living. Hi. Okay. Though he says, I've been reading We the Living though. Yeah, that's...

That could be a little challenging. I can donate plasma. Oh, you can donate plasma three times a week. Okay. Well, I don't know if I personally would want to donate plasma three times a week because as you know, if you've been following me for a long time, I've been myself getting over an illness and I'm still technically underweight, but I would certainly donate plasma once.

If, again, you know my doctor cleared it and everything and I was clear of the virus I would donate it once I think a lot of people would donate it once. Right. If that's what's required to safely get a lot of other people well that would be good.

I would, I would certainly do it, but we don't have the information. I don't know if I've been exposed and if I have been exposed, I don't know that I'm out of the woods yet. As far as I know, probably not. I've either been exposed in the past and was asymptomatic, which would be quite lucky or, you know, maybe I've been exposed and not been through it yet, which again, I think is very unlikely. But the other thing we don't know is regardless of the precautions that we take out there, there's some small chance you're going to get exposed to it. So, um,

Josh says there's a bigger needle and they miss a lot so you can get a hematoma. So there's danger to it. Yeah. So, you know, this is a, this is a calculated risk that people take. Donating plasma is not as trivial as donating blood. And so you would want to do it with people who have administered the process of

many, many times and don't cause hematomas and horrible things like that. Yeah. It's, it's a risky thing. A drug therapy, if it was safe and worked would be a lot better. And of course a vaccine would be even better. No,

Now, Robert says it's a tough question and not a philosophically simple one. The question of whether a lockdown is selfish. Yes. The question, this is applied philosophy and your own is, you know, done applied philosophy many times it's hard in certain situations, and I think it is and I think reasonable people can disagree on this issue.

But again, I drew my analogy to the Ground Zero mosque situation. There were factors in that time right after 9-11 that said, hey, you know, yes, the principle of private property rights would be, would say that if you have a piece of property near Ground Zero in New York City, you should be able to do whatever in the world you wanted with it.

And nonetheless, I think many of us at that time were, for good reason, against the permitting of the building of a ground zero mosque, a mosque near ground zero after 9-11. And similarly right now, you know, and again, if you know, if you are against a limited lockdown, right?

Again, with conditions, right? I have all the conditions that the government needs to be doing its damn job during the lockdown so that it's worthwhile. If you're against a limited lockdown, then why not just get rid of social security completely tomorrow? You know, why not? If we're proposing privacy legislation in New Hampshire, just get rid of all the regulatory apparatus that permits the collecting of personal data tomorrow, right?

That's the ideal. Get rid of it now. Right. And I'm saying no, you know, in an ideal context, sure, there would not have to be a lockdown, but we are far down a path, such that you could say everything's going to be hunky dory if there's no lockdown. Yeah.

DOJ says they can treat you like a terrorist if you don't listen to the quarantine so there's no due process and you can be killed by drone. Obviously, that is not part of the bargain. And, you know, if all they've got is threats, and they don't have their own conduct to make it selfishly worthwhile for people, then no, obviously I don't agree with that type of measure, Josh.

You know, again, it's, it's a limited within a context, how long is justified and why is it justified, I would want to talk to Amish on the show and I'm in the list of his long list of interview requests, and I'm very small, you know, low down on the list because I'm not Fox News or anybody else who wants to, to talk to him. So, yeah.

Yeah, so let's get back to the positive, right? You know, again, I think that there are reasons due to the uncertainty of the situation and the potential threat out there such that you selfishly would want to for a limited period of time quarantine. Moreover, I've made the argument a little bit today, but a lot last week when I was talking with James, that

It is justified for a limited time period for even government right now to mandate a lockdown on certain preconditions. Then the question is, how do you take this time and make it as a good time period of self-development for you? How do you make the best of it? What sort of lemonade do you make out of this situation?

A few words says I'm thinking of it as being selfish. I don't want to take my child out of the house to possibly catch the virus. I don't want to bring the virus into my home with my immunocompromised loved one. Yes. And, you know, as I was indicating earlier, it's hard to know which of us is really immunocompromised. Not everybody has had that sort of testing done that, you know, for example, some years ago, I had not felt very well and I

went to a doctor, a functional medicine doctor, and he tested me for everything under the sun and he found autoimmune Hashimoto's. So at least I've been aware of having that as a condition and very recently done a lot to clean up my diet because now finally in the last year from other reasons, I've taken it seriously. But does that mean I'm out of the woods from this? I don't know that I'm out of the woods from this as part of the reason that I've been stressed about it. Um,

So, but a lot of people are out there walking around not knowing that they're what they call metabolically challenged or compromised in certain ways. So, you know, you personally, there is a reason to do this, if not just for your own health, then for the health of other people. You don't want to see your neighbors suffering.

killed needlessly because of this, right? It's, you know, it's a very limited emergency. And in limited emergencies, I think it's quite selfish to help out your fellow man and help yourself in face of uncertainty. Robert says, some people claim that this makes us more accepting of government impositions. Some claim it makes us more aware.

I'm totally with the latter. Yes, I think it makes us much more aware. And what I've been doing out there is, you know, retweeting all this stuff from Stossel and everybody else to say, yes, it is government that has put us in this situation because it's true. They have,

really botched this by downplaying the threat and thinking that because they downplayed the threat, it was okay to keep the usual wall of regulations up so that the free market couldn't come in and address the situation and foresee what was going on. You know, if we had a fully free market, what would have happened maybe instead of our market crash

is you would have had a whole bunch of investment in certain sectors, all the sectors that would supply a ramp up in the industry. What do we have in New York right now? The one good news story that I saw yesterday is that the NYU School of Medicine is allowing doctors

the students to graduate three months early so that they can become interns and ramp up, you know, and help to meet the demand, the increased demand for coronavirus. There are a lot of institutions and companies and individuals who are ready to step up and meet this demand, but government has not allowed them. And still this week, they've been shutting it down. So again, my support for the shutdown is,

by government, right, and so far it's mandated, is very limited. And I think it's appropriate to the context, just like the Ground Zero Mosque prohibition was appropriate for the context.

But at the same time, if there were no mandate, I would think that in the face of all the uncertainty right now, that it would be selfish for people to want to do this for a limited period of time. Even if things were ideal, you might want to hang low for a couple weeks and see what's going on and get more information before you went out into the world. Yes, I think it's we are more aware. And then the question is, with that awareness, does change happen?

He says the best part is simply increased awareness and not taking status quo or anything else for granted. Yes, you get a new perspective as is customary in a situation like this of what's important and what to do. He says he's learned not to take the Dow Joe industrial average staying over 20,000 for granted.

He says the great test of his financial worst case scenario. And so far he's passed. So that's, that's good, Robert. I'm glad to hear that. Cause I know I've seen you talk about the market and I was wondering, hoping that things are good for you. Yes. This is the sort of thing that we get to learn during this time period. Yeah. So what can you do? Think about the ways that you can turn this time period around and improve your health and

take up that project that you have always wanted to do. Um, think about really sort of restructuring hierarchy of values in your life. Uh,

There's a lot of good things that can come out of this time period. And yes, of course, it is okay to look at this as an opportunity for growth instead of focusing on the fear and the anxiety and everything else. It is okay to do that. In fact, I think it's necessary for us to do this. So go on a diet from this stuff, right? The social media feeds and the news feeds.

and turn towards either some of the content that's made online. Of course, I'm very selfish. I want you to join my logic class. It's going to be two days a week, starting next week, an hour each meeting. And that'll be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you want a free preview of it, it's going to be tomorrow, 3 p.m. Pacific time, noon, I mean, excuse me, 3 p.m. Eastern time, noon Pacific time.

And it's going to be on Zoom only. You need to register for the Zoom meeting via the link that I dropped in the chat here earlier. I'll go ahead and drop it again now. And it's also in the description to this video. So I hope you can join me for that. Just check that out as one of the possible ways for you to spend some time during this period. If it so happens, and I really hope it is, I did see a headline, by the way, that Cuomo is reporting that the new case numbers are leveling off a bit in New York. What?

what that means in terms of the amount of testing they're doing. It's hard to know. We won't know for a while, but maybe in a few weeks, we're going to be free to go back to whatever schedule we want. And in that case, I'll have you covered for the class as well. You'll be able to watch replays and then I'll have office hours that'll be made convenient for you and stuff like that. So I will take care of you guys, regardless of what happens going forward. As I said, I gave it a lot of thought. Could I take the plunge and do this? So I'm ready to offer this

We will meet tomorrow and talk about it. And in the meantime, yeah, think about what sort of project you've been putting off for some day that maybe you could pick up on now. And yes, it's okay for you to selfishly turn your focus to some of that while at the same time, yes, let's keep the government busy.

feet to the fire, keep those bureaucrats feet to the fire and make sure that insofar as we are staying in, that they're making it worthwhile, that they're giving us the tests, all the information that we need to know that we're achieving something by staying home.

Someone is asking, do I know what the day or time is for the logic that I'm going to offer it at either two or three Eastern time, two or 3pm Eastern time, and I'm not exactly sure which of those two I'm going to choose and I'm so I'll think about that and try to announce that tomorrow. Tomorrow I've already scheduled the webinar webinar for 3pm Eastern time.

So I'm going to keep to that for the live webinar. And that may end up being the time slot going forward. Is there an age limit? No, there is no age limit. What I would say, though, is it's probably going to be appropriate for high school age kids at the youngest age.

Probably that would be an appropriate limit, but I'm not going to make an age limit. But if you're choosing for your child, I would recommend probably high school or older. Okay, so I hope that helps. I hope to see you guys here. And I hope that in the meantime, you guys insofar as you are

order to be staying home and you're not happy about it that let's at least kind of like I said hold the politicians feet to the fire and make them make it worthwhile for us to be home and then that we do individually everything that we can to make it worthwhile for ourselves yeah Robert says even if it's a beginner's course it's also AP logic I think we're going to have some fun with it I've been reviewing some materials and I'm looking forward to it so

Okay. I'm out of here, everybody. I got to go. You got to go get some sun today and keep yourself healthy. Take care.