Dr Wil Reilly - No Empirical Evidence for These Lock Downs

Dr Wil Reilly - No Empirical Evidence for These Lock Downs - Dr Wilfred Reilly is a best-selling author, professor at Kentucky State University and a rising star. Wil has appeared on the Break It Down Show several times talking about race hoaxes, social taboo topics like the lack of racial violence, the 1776 message vs the flawed 1619 project. This episode features our interview with Wil and Pete A Turner as Wil answers questions regarding his bold paper citing a lack of evidence in support of Shelter In Place protocols.

Get Wil's Taboo, 10 Things We Can't Talk About here 

Using the numbers provided Wil makes his case that there's no defined benefit for sheltering in place, quarantining or some intermediate maintenance of society. Pete and Wil explore a variety of scientific facts, social and cultural norms plus, comparing and contrasting the pandemic and the panic caused by COVID-19. Wil's work on hate crime hoaxes is essential.

Haiku
COVID reactions
Lockdowns not backed by data
The dangerous game

Similar episodes: 
Bob Woodson https://youtu.be/JJuBVpxukfw 
Dan Crenshaw https://youtu.be/74UQ6JKQO1w
 Wil Reilly https://youtu.be/0EuXfX96BTs

​Join us in supporting Save the Brave as we battle PTSD. www.savethebrave.org​ 

Executive Producer/Host/Intro: Pete A. Turner https://youtu.be/mYoUxRJzXcA 
Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev ​ ​​​ 

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Transcript

Pete Turner  0:00  
Everybody Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of your break it down show Today's episode is another one with will Riley because Dr. Will is another one was bill reilly because Dr. Wolf Riley is on fire. He is a professor at Kentucky State University. And what he does, he says things that are uncomfortable to sell and yet true. Here is his latest thing and this is hot. This is getting picked up by a lot of news media. But he got we got here as early as anybody if not first. ​

Pete Turner  0:00  
Everybody Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of your break it down show Today's episode is another one with will Riley because Dr. Will is another one was bill reilly because Dr. Wolf Riley is on fire. He is a professor at Kentucky State University. And what he does, he says things that are uncomfortable to sell and yet true. Here is his latest thing and this is hot. This is getting picked up by a lot of news media. But he got we got here as early as anybody if not first. His statement is there is no empirical data to support shelter in place protocols from states doesn't mean it doesn't work just means you can't prove it empirically. It means that if you look at Sweden, Finland, Utah, Florida, DC, New York, it's hard to make sense of the data and say this is reliably working. Wow, that goes against what we're all being told. So is that a fact? Is it reality? I don't know. We're gonna get into that here in this episode, and let me tell you something. You're gonna be uncomfortable. This is what we'll does. He takes facts and drives them home people talk about we got to believe in science. Well, here you go. Here's a political scientist who is a methods guy, a quant guy and he looks at the numbers and says If This Then That await, if then fest fails, okay? Whereas the reality, I love these kind of episodes, they challenge the norms, they force us to think in different ways and I know you're gonna love it. Hey, if you want to support the show, probably one more thing about well, he's got a fantastic book that I've got a little tiny not even a full blurb in. But he's got a fantastic book along the same lines, taboo. 10 things that we can't discuss. This book will absolutely unseat you from your norms, whether you're talking about you know, racial bias, genetic advantages, IQ gap, whatever, it's going to be white privilege. You want to pick something that's uncomfortable to talk about. We'll talk about it and then those the data at you about the racial divide or racial violence or violence against LGBTQ communities, it's always There he goes after it gets it down with the numbers. You will absolutely love the book if you like to learn things and go Damn, I didn't think about that. Well, I cannot say enough about how great of a guest he is. He's been on several times talking about the 1776 project and his books and everything else. Great, great, great guest you're gonna love the show. Hey, support the show. We're growing on Twitter. We're growing on YouTube. Everything's exploding right now since the COVID-19 things but now, you all have been listening and sharing. I thank you for that. If you're new to the show, a buckle up, get ready. We change it up all the time. If you like having a lot of variety of what comes at you day to day with incredible guests. We got you covered. And the last thing I'm going to say before I send you on your way to listen to will is save the brave save the brave org that's our home charity. That's where we ask for your help. That's where we want your support. Go get him Everybody stay safe. Stay healthy. Here comes will Riley. Lions rock productions.

Unknown Speaker  2:55  
This is Jamie.

sebastian junger  2:56  
This is Jordan. Dexter from the offspring Navy Sebastian. You This is Stuart COPPA. This is Mitch Alexis handy somebody there's a skunk Baxter.

Unknown Speaker  3:04  
Gabby Reese is Rob bell. This is john Leon Guerrero. Hey,

Pete Turner  3:06  
and this is Pete a Turner.

wil reilly  3:10  
All right, this is will Riley live on the break it down show with Pete Turner. Good to be here been here a couple times. How are you man?

Pete Turner  3:21  
I am good. It's a Saturday morning. We've got an interesting conversation to have here. We got a little bit of groundwork though we owe the audience because not everybody knows the show. Not everybody has been familiar with the work. So let's spend a minute defining terms and understanding the bone of feeties. Why on earth is a political scientist allowed to speak intelligently upon the lack of or the actions of the government in terms of empirical data?

wil reilly  3:50  
Well, I think there are a couple of different things here. So I teach political science. I'm a quantitative social scientist at a state university Kentucky State One of my roles in that job is teaching a lot of our quantitative methods, courses, research methods, things like that, that have a statistical foundation. So when it comes to criticizing an expert in their field, there are a couple of levels I wouldn't presume to argue with a doctor about a purely medical point around COVID-19 or anything else. If a doctor said, I believe this virus can be transmitted aerosol quickly through the air or through touch of a hand to hard surfaces, I wouldn't be in a position to challenge that. However, it also has to be recognized that doctors aren't necessarily better quantitative methodologist than physicist or political scientists. They're not necessarily better executive leaders by any means than governors or generals or master sergeants. So there are other considerations that come into play when you're talking about these medical issues. My main point on COVID-19 I became involved in the conversation to the point of commenting on methodological papers Are bantering on Twitter and this later became, I recently put out an article and spiked large circulation British magazine. And it looks like that's going to become a fairly serious journal piece. But what led to me getting involved in the conversation was strictly my questions about the mathematics that were being used by some of these physicians and some of these epidemiologists, so nothing really medical going on. But our response to COVID-19 and Pete, we've talked about this off air was driven in part by a an almost panicked response to two mathematical projections. One was the World Health Organization's projection that COVID-19 could kill 3.4% of all people that was the death rate among anyone who might be infected. The second was a paper by a guy named Neil Ferguson nice guy by all accounts, British methodologist, but he estimated that 2 million people can die in the United States in the setup scenario where we did not think to mitigate the disease. One to 80% of people eventually got the bug, not 20 or 50 are the rates you more commonly see during epidemics. And three, the death rate was essentially 1%. It was right around there, it was quite high. So in response to these, these sort of Doomsday projections, three or 4% of all people die, or only 1% of all people die, but everyone gets it and we do very little to respond. We saw extreme extreme responsive behavior when it came to COVID-19. And a lot of people, including not just myself, but I mean, dr. john itas, and his team over at Stanford, many people writing in sort of the tech sector people began to question Are some of these things accurate? Are these projections real? What we now see is that the current ima g model, which takes social distancing into account, um, predict about 70,000 total deaths in the USA from COVID-19. And I think it's fair to say that's what a lot of quants, a lot of methodologists in the business world military sector. By the way, A civilian tech kind of predicted. I mean, and that is a situation where you want to be right. Obviously, no one wants a million people to die. Yeah. But those are the areas where a lot of general scientists disagreed with some of the medical projections. It's not the question of does a doctor best know how to use a ventilator? It's the question of, well, when you're saying 4% death rate, what's that based on? Yeah. And quick, final comment on that. One of the things that was apparent early on, and this produced again, in terms of the elite general presses produced column in the Journal editorial, ugly leave editorial, but one of the things that would became apparent was that we had what's called the denominator problem. So those estimates of one to 3%, death rates weren't made up. I'm not impugning anyone's integrity here in the least. But they came as far as I understand from the death rates that had been seen or projected to that point. And the problem with that is that the pool of people that were taking COVID-19 tests was extraordinarily unrepresentative in the United States until quite recently to take a COVID-19 test. And I know this because I tried to, you had to meet a couple of conditions you had to be second symptomatic. So you had to be coughing, you had to be visibly ill to the point where in my case, as an adult male, you're trying to go to the doctor, to you had to have had actual close contact with someone who previously had been diagnosed with COVID-19. And at one point in Kentucky, as I understand they were calling these people it wasn't just us saying, you know, funky flu, and three you had to call a hospital and go through about a 30 minute screener to take these tests. So I mean, a large number of the people taking the COVID-19 tests were inpatients and hospitals. Almost all of them were visibly sick. So when you say that 3% of those people died, that's not necessarily surprising. And if you talk to a family practice physician or just a buddy who was a doctor Around this time, many doctors were saying, look, we're sending 50 people We're telling people just to shelter in place for every person that we actually test and the sort of arduous manner. And what that would mean is that the IFR, the infection fatality rate for the disease is much, much lower than was projected, because we know the deaths, but we're taking that number of deaths and comparing it to a much larger population of sick people that we originally thought. And when we started doing what are called randomized serological tests, we found that this is exactly the case. And I don't think you know, the methods community is trying to take credit for this right. I mean, we all just want people to live. But I mean, there have been large tests done in Bonn in Germany, for example. They that is that test found that 15% of people had or had had recently COVID-19 that would place the death rate for the disease. The IFR at around point three 7% we had a similar test very well done in the USA, as I understand they use a very low false positive test from I think decode genetics. This is in Miami 7% of people Roughly tested positive, that would put the CFR the IFR there at about point 2%. So I think that the comment that came from many people with a general stats background is you have to resolve this denominator question, or we don't know what the death rate for the disease is. That's the point that was being made on methods, blogs and so on. It wasn't the doctors don't know how to care for someone in a hospital room. I want to I want to be clear about that.

Pete Turner  10:26  
Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's fair. When we look at the silo expertise of a doctor versus the more multifaceted expertise of a political scientist, you know, the doctors absolutely should be talking about the ways to prevent disease in terms of washing hands, all that kind of thing. But in terms of getting people back to work, unemployment going well past 20% in an instant to like a drag like an unemployment dragster, right. That's not the purview of doctors that really is more the purview of the multifaceted Wanted political scientists. So how do you take these? Look, this is a global problem. So what's like a multivariate cubed kind of, you know, problem where you can pick one aspect of it, and high hyper focus on it. But really, this is gonna be a thing that is not easily solved by twisting one knob.

wil reilly  11:24  
Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. And I don't think it's just political scientists that have a role to play here. I mean, I think you're going to see governors and mayors having to act in, you know, an active leadership role and make these decisions for their regions. I mean, obviously, there's an extraordinarily large place here for doctors and for epidemiologists, I mean place for economists. But the point you made is an important point. There's more than one thing that has to be considered here. So when you watch the online debate about this or even the debate around some scientific papers, a lot of people are acting as though the only thing to consider is How many people might die from COVID-19. And that's simply not realistic. Um, if considering basic social distancing and mitigation, which the IMG model does, you have an upper bound of say 200,000 people that might die and a lower bound of 50,000 people that might die. But to get to the upper bound, you would have to keep people in their home or to get to the lower bound, you'd have to keep people in their homes for say, six months. I think that a realistic society might say, look, we're going to have to accept 100,000 deaths as opposed to 50,000 deaths, 3 million people die roughly every year, in order to keep the economy going in order to prevent the food supply chain from collapsing, so on down the line. So I think it's the role of the doctor or the epidemiologist to come in there and say, Look, these are my projections and I as a medical man favor the lowest number of deaths possible, but then you also need an economist to come in with her stats. Well, we also don't want Great Depression level unemployment. And the leader, the person that synthesizes those perspectives and makes a decision in real time is going to have to decide what to do. And you're probably going to see a combination of things. I think one of the things that is often said about people that have sort of, quote unquote, heterodox position on COVID-19 is well, you want to go back to the beaches and the rave scene tomorrow and not really, I mean, I think that the the middle ground solution can be as simple as what you see in a Kroger, a Tesco. I mean, you've got spit shields between people, people are encouraged to give each other that six feet of politeness that we used to at any rate in an armed society, wash your hands, I have a little bottle of hand sanitizer I carry with me, you know, cough in a respectful manner, this this kind of thing that would prevent a great, great percentage of the deaths that could accompany COVID-19. So no one's saying the options are either stay bottled up at your house all day, or go out to an orgy. I mean, when you talk about some of the things that were going on in spring break A few weeks back, but those aren't the options. The options are. Do you wear a mask around your neck and put it on? If you feel nervous? Do you sanitize your hands? Do you give people space? Do businesses have separate entrance and exit routes? There are a ton of things you could do to make this a great deal safer without eliminating everyone's job, I would say

Pete Turner  14:19  
if will Riley was president? And that would be a cool thing. I think. You know, the, the folks come to you and they say they say, you know approximately whatever the number is, 3 million people die your United States. This will, you know, potentially create deaths from a new way of dying to the tune of 100,000 people. But we don't know what the ultimate number will be. How many standard deviations away are we from like, wow, this is actually a problem the president needs to worry about not talking about funding and provisioning. I'm talking about like, making dramatic changes like cratering the entire economy or you know, quarantining people to keep them safe, you know, these these binary options? Like what? All deaths are tragic and we don't want anybody to die unnecessarily. So if that's the case, how does the President manage those? Is it one standard deviation away? Is it two? Before we start to go, holy shit, this thing really requires dramatic, different action?

wil reilly  15:25  
Well, I mean, first of all, I think this is one of those that as we both get better known, might be quoted dramatically out of context, like I'll help soldier in business man, both of whom have assault rifles taught callously about death. I mean, obviously, you do want to take this extraordinarily seriously. But in all honesty, if I were in a presidential role, and someone came to me and said, we're talking about a disease that over the course of a year might kill 100,000 individuals who don't Will you shutter the economy? My response would be no, I would say that flatly. And I'm saying that from a leadership perspective, rather than a medical perspective, right? Um, and there are practical reasons for this, we tend to treat we're very removed from real life in the upper middle class in the United States. I've literally had my younger cousins, for example, as some of those classic questions like, where does meat come from in the store. And at some point, you're gonna have to take them out to kill it and demonstrate how that process begins. I think we have a similar opinion of money. I mean, we no longer use quote unquote, the Kings good coin gold, we have this paper money that's valuable, because we believe it is. And then beyond that, all this funny money and credit cards and checks with two or three names on the top and so on. So it's very tempting to say, Well, why would we risk any lives? Why wouldn't we just print money and subsidize people for six months until the crisis is over? And the problem with that is that money is the consolidated sweat of our brow, that stuff still comes from somewhere. So I mean, if we lose $10 trillion, I mean one of the major investment To the US government and the business sector is in health care. If we accept the loss of $10 trillion, we're accepting the loss of $3 trillion toward Medicare, Medicaid, the private sector money that would have gone directly to saving the lives of next year's patients and the Mayo Clinic. So if I were sitting behind the Resolute desk, and I think that would be a mistake for the country, but no more than a number of the ones we've made recently. Um, if I were sitting behind the Resolute desk, and someone came to me and said, we're talking about 100,000 potential deaths, Will you shut down the academy? Absolutely not. I mean, we'd have to talk about how social distancing capacity practice that sort of thing. Um, but and in terms of how many standard deviations away from 100,000, that would depend on the confidence interval. But I mean, again, 2.8 to 3.1 million people die in a typical year if someone just said a disease might kill 200,000 people, would you shutter the entire economy, speaking personally, probably not. I think again, we'd have to do very intense, well done, social distancing. There's very little sign from sweet enough for that matter. You That works much work significantly more poorly. I and many others have written about this. But I think that again, I want to emphasize the issue is that that's not what was presented to the President, what was presented to Mr. Trump, and to our governors was this figure of 2.2 million people died. And I don't think that unless they're trained Quantum methodologist, they were aware of what that meant. Um, so I mean, the original paper by Ferguson actually is not a panic inducing document. I mean, what he says is, you could cut his initial death figures in half, just by doing very basic things like quarantining the sick. So that 2.2 million figure comes from a zone I want to emphasize this because his works been misinterpreted, comes from a situation where we don't do anything. That's a hypothetical that leads off the paper just to illustrate why leadership is important. So when the media started saying that and saying, well, we can have bodies in the street, that's not what anyone was seriously proposing, you know, at the most brutal level of utilitarian And by the way, if you cut that in half and you get a million deaths, that's one in 350 people in the United States. I'm not advocating for that, of course, but we are a huge society. Um, during military engagements or even serious business projects like building a bridge, the kind of risks of loss that we were talking about in the worst case scenario are extremely common. And I think those sound terrifying to us just because that would be so many people because we've taken over a continent but at any rate, that that idea of millions den was presented to our leaders. I won't say they panicked, but I will say there was a very intense reaction to it. And that was the source of that fear no one gave the hundred thousand dollar final figure in the beginning. I would suspect that if you took the IMA ci model with any reasonable current parameter, you will you estimate a point 5% IFR and this is to some extent guesswork, but I would assume that most of the estimates that would come out of there would be on the order of 100 hundred 20,000. So I don't think anyone's talking now about millions of people dying. But that's what started the reaction to the crisis. When I write I often describe this as the COVID-19 crisis and panic, right? Because there certainly is a crisis. I mean, 100,000 deaths a country, man, that's terrible. But there was the surrounding freakout a guy named Thomas puedo, who again, normally very solid stats guy estimated that we could lose, I believe it was 4 million people. I don't think it was 10. No, it was 10 million people estimate if we lose 4% of the population, that's 10 million people given some parameter flips. So we were seeing people running around saying this sort of thing. 10 million could die. And that's what prompted this. That's what caused this. And that's also why so many general scientists said well, wait, what are you basing that on, man?

Pete Turner  20:40  
Yeah, let's back up real quick. So you've declared that you will use the Resolute desk in your presidency. I'm either going to go with the Wilson desk or do the Johnson route and have the senate cabinetry shop meet me my own specific desk. So just should we ever find ourselves in the Oval Office, one of us being the boss, we can hold each other To our commitments

wil reilly  21:01  
on day one, different desk strategies. The upside of building your own desk would be that you can take it home. But then again, I mean, if you're the president, I assume you probably have a good deal of money on the side. By that point, you just build an exact replica of the Resolute desk, as Hillary Clinton oddly did. Yeah. Remember that scene where she read the emails behind a replica of the Resolute desk looked a little tearful. Yeah, that was weird. But anyway, I think I'd go with the classic desk,

Pete Turner  21:26  
the classic. Okay, good. Fair enough. I couldn't let the Resolute desk point go by without saying something about it. One of the questions that your article prompted when I posted it was what about all the lack of provisioning of medical supplies in general, right, because we're trying to flatten the curve to give the hospitals and the supply chain a chance to catch up. And that supply chain problem goes throughout like toilet paper. All of these places are our local Albertsons. Like we hired every truck driver we could find because, you know, now as a business, we've got this problem. But this rush of people coming for very specific things, you know, they know how to run their store on a day to day basis. But whether you're running a hospital, a grocery store or something else, you know, you know, all the restaurants that are now selling liquor, you know. So, talk a little bit about that aspect of your article and how you consider that with your with your data.

wil reilly  22:23  
Well, one of the things about flattening the curve, but I want to emphasize right off the bat, the same number of people die in the curve flattening scenario. This is something that is almost never mentioned. I mean, you're talking about a less elevated, more classically bell shaped curve, and that's it. So the argument for curve flattening was never we're going to save lives directly. The argument for curve flattening was that if we don't flatten the curve, and everyone hits the hospitals at once they could be swamped. But again, most of the projections that I've seen for that include radically higher rates of death from COVID 19 in hospitalization from COVID-19, we've actually seen so again, and I mean, please, if anyone's listening pretty high IQ audience, correct me if I'm making some incorrect assumptions about where these figures come from so on. My understanding is who and for that matter, Ferguson use very specific Chinese data that probably turned out to be pretty flawed, but M is simply put in a sentence. Um, if the, if the actual fatality rate for COVID-19 is point 3%, instead of 3%. At the crudest level of analysis, we're only going to see a 10th as many people flooding into the hospitals. So again, the argument for curve flattening was based on the assumption that if you've got an 80% infection rate and a 1% fatality rate, and let's say a 5% ventilator use rate hospitals are going to be absolutely full of people. But on the other hand, if you've got a point, 3% fatality rate and a 1.5% hospitalization rate and we mitigate significantly, that's not going to happen. So I don't really think Assuming that we can avoid swapping of the medical system, I don't see an advantage of flattening the curve over an attempt to build herd immunity. That again is a mathematical point. If you look at the tables in Ferguson 2020, the paper let me click on it here. Impact of non pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 mortality, people whether they agree with perhaps my perspective of his perspective should read that should be aware of the fact. But I mean, if you look at the tables in there, you've got essentially the same number of deaths broken out over a longer period of time to delay the hospital, overwhelming that was projected to occur. But kind of rambling here, if we only have a 10th as many sick and dead people that hospital overwhelming is not going to occur. And it might make sense to kind of RAM through the pick of the disease. And again, we're seeing this in real time because eight US states never shut down. I mean, I wrote a fairly well known article about this and some of these are large places. I mean, Nebraska. I didn't use it in the original analysis, but you could throw in Oklahoma, Utah or Salt Lake Cities located. We have countries overseas like Sweden that did not shut down to any significant degree. What they did was practice well done social distance and keep a close eye on the hospitals. And again, the hospitals were not overwhelmed. So yeah, I mean, if you're talking about a situation where the medical system is facing the risk of being swamped, then yeah, you might want to social distance very intensely, or even consider a lack bound or do some of the things in terms of hiring backup people that you've talked about? But the question is, again, these are empirical questions. is that happening? Do we see evidence that that's occurring? What I think we see in a lot of states, I communicate online with a good buddy who's located in Tulsa executive drive out there, but she was talking to me about their hospital closing many hospitals in order to sort of be team players in terms of COVID shut down all elective surgeries including pretty significant thing, plastic surgery, gender transition surgery, but also, I'm assuming Some of the standard medical procedures you do if you're experienced, for example, severe burns, unless those were absolutely necessary. That was all taken away. So doctors and nurses had very little to do while they waited for this wave of COVID-19 patients, but in the huge majority of states that never materialized. I mean, you've got a large number of states. Let me look at COVID deaths as of the last day, I counted, because I'm redoing the spiked piece with some slightly improved methods. I mean, that's as of yesterday in a bunch of these states. I mean, New Hampshire, 81, Idaho, 63. Wyoming seven, you know, some fairly good sized states here looks like Delaware. 159.

Pete Turner  26:42  
So, the Wyoming has not even a million people in it, and it's enormous, especially if you drive through it.

wil reilly  26:48  
Okay, well, New Mexico 131 good. Good point. Good correction, but Arkansas 64, Oregon 100. For me, there's no way to downplay that one for us to really debate that one. So I mean, I The question is, are we seeing the nightmare that was originally projected? And I don't see an honest way to say that we are. What we're seeing is about 65,000 deaths. So far, this is something that's been going on for roughly three months. Very intense now a month in a week, month in two weeks. So that is horrible. I mean, that is nearly the death toll that we'll see for opiates this year. It's a significant killer. It'll be top five, most likely, but I don't necessarily think that the original predictions that lead to flattening the curve, were born out.

Pete Turner  27:36  
Yeah, that's that's fair comment. In your article also, you talked about not using Asian country data for some reason you pulled that out. Can you talk about that briefly?

wil reilly  27:47  
Sure. Well, I in the article I do mention the Asian countries what I say is that So first, I look at the US states that opted never to shut down by which I mean formally interesting shelter in place. Order. Like I said, there are a bunch of them. I mean, you've got both Dakotas, you do some small states like Wyoming, but you've also got Utah, you've got Nebraska, you've got Iowa, you could throw Oklahoma in that mix, you could throw South Carolina in that mix. I mean, they did issue a sort of order eventually, but this took until April the sixth and it allowed religious services and some other things. But um, I look at those states and I find that on average, there are not more cases of COVID-19 in states that never shut down. And there are not more deaths from COVID-19 in states that never shut down. If you look at COVID-19 cases per million, so this is with population fully adjusted for in the social distancing states, you got 729 on average, when I did this first analysis, if you look at deaths per million in the social distancing states, you got 12. Now if you look at the non social distancing states where you had a full lockdown you had on average 1300 92 just cases per million and you had 5400 that's familiar. So I mean, to the extent that that's significant at all, um, the advantage would be in favor of the non lockdown social distancing states. So in the paper, I then go over to Sweden and I say, Well, you know, Sweden might not be performing exactly as well as its Nordic neighbors. Although it was very close. In fact, Sweden had 1300 nine. d'espagnat tested confirmed cases per million people. If I recall correctly, Denmark had 1274 and Norway had 1221 a month so slight. There wasn't a big difference really at all, but perhaps a slight advantage for lockdowns in that cases versus the reverse in the USA, but really, that's

Pete Turner  29:45  
not statistically significant. I mean, that could be someone had an orgy or something.

wil reilly  29:50  
Yeah, no, it's not i'm not i'm just sort of steel manning the other side's case. I mean, what we what I saw, frankly, is that there was very little difference if any, between lockdown states and Social Justice distancing states if you adjust for basic things like population that's that's why the article got published. I mean, there there was very little difference there. What difference there was advantage, the social distancing non lockdown states. And there might be a parallel to dieting there. I mean, you can stay six feet away from people you can wash your hands so on pretty much indefinitely. How long can you stay in your house without then bingeing and rushing to Walmart with 1000 other people or playing five on five basketball in the park or doing the things you've seen people do in those lockdown states? Um, that's just I mean, that's just speculation, but I mean, I definitely didn't see a massive advance for lockdowns. The question you asked was about Asia, though. I do mention the Asian countries because a lot of them didn't lock down. I mean, you had Japan you had SK South Korea. One of the city states I believe I looked at Singapore, not Hong Kong, all of them had very low case and death rates as well. Easily on par with the rest of the world are better. The reason I didn't directly throw them into the analysis with the kind of regret Russian techniques that were used and so on is that I do think it's not a fair comparison. I mean, it would make my point. But there are extreme cultural differences there. I mean, are you going to see the same level of obedience to an order to, you know, treat others with respect or something in New Jersey that you wouldn't South Korea? And secondarily, they did extremely good testing and tracing upfront. If you look at some of those Asian powers like South Korea, I don't really know how respectful the civil rights they were in the beginning. I mean, they went around to everyone that had been infected and for example, a church, they essentially interrogated them, they found everyone they'd been in contact with. They tested all those people. They set up drive through testing stations and infected cities, and you kind of get the impression that they were walking guys into them. It wasn't, you could say yes, or you could say no, and they found most of their cases early on. You've seen a couple secondary surges, but they they did wrap that up. And that's why for a very long time, South Korea was the only country reporting what turned out to be about the actual IFR for COVID-19. I believe they added some seniors later on that boosted this number, but for a long time, their their CFR actually their tested death rate was point five or point six m, s versus, you know, two, three and so on. But the Asian countries did a much better job of wrapping that up early on. And that's why I don't directly compare them to New York, for example,

Pete Turner  32:28  
a friend of mine, Peter Van Buren, he lives in New York City, and he was talking to a number of hospital folks, especially like the hasty hospitals. And listen, this is something that we're good at doing. We can throw hospital up in hours. This is like the government can do this really fast. But each empty bed is a point of inefficiency. So do you think when this is all said and done, that we'll look at the President's response and say, not that it wasn't enough, but that it was too much response and that, you know, we have looked to make them the mercy and the hope and the Other hospital ships, so show up somewhere. That's billions of dollars of activity that largely was wasted. So do you think that as we look at this and we quants go through and look at things, we'll see that the response actually was too much. Hey, this is Pete Turner from lions rock productions, we create podcasts around here. And if you your brand or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me. I'll give you the advice on the right gear, the best plan to show you how to take a podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable. That's scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown, show calm, let me help. I want to hear about it. So do you think that as we look at this and we the quants go through and look at things, we'll see that the response actually was too much?

wil reilly  33:43  
Um, yeah, probably. I mean, I think so the question that's going to be discussed by political scientists and epidemiologists, I mean, psychiatrists to some extent and look at the mental health impacts as economists um, for a while is given what we knew was bad decision made? No, I've made some comments about what you know what you and I would do if it's, you know, local leader types. We were actually president sitting there with the big desk. If someone came to me and the projection was 100,000 No, you're not shutting down the economy. Hopefully doesn't sound harsh to say that, but I don't think a competent leader would do that. Um, but if someone came to me, and the projection was 3 million, yeah, maybe. I mean, if you're talking about that original who estimate like a pathogen with a 4% fatality rate is nothing to mess around with, right. I mean, what would the secondary fatality rates there be? I mean, as you talk about just ordinary civilian citizens, you know, armed but not trained, realize that one in 20 of their neighbors is going to die counting secondary health conditions. What would the food riots look like? Would people still go to work? I mean, so we're presented with that scenario. I think it's understandable that Trump and kind of the nation's senior governors like Cuomo reacted the way they did. Frankly, the question is, and I don't know, I, I didn't read some of these papers until days later, I'm just a guy, I have the luxury of sitting on an ass thinking that's my job. So I could read this stuff and say, Hey, that doesn't make a lot of sense and make mathematical notes. But I mean, so the real question is, should someone have read through, say Ferguson's paper and asked, hey, how did this guy estimate an 80%? infection rate? I'm not saying he was, but are people just making this stuff up? Right. And I wondered that myself, when I look at some of the things like the IMA g model, like, you know, right now, we've got about 65,000 dead, but I am a 3d model while design model, but until a couple days ago, is predicting a total of like, 62,000 dead, right. And the other day they tweaked it, and they were like, nope, 78 I mean, I think that there should have been more questions asked like, Where are you getting these numbers? Right? Is this one province in southern China? Are you believing their governments data? Why aren't we one question I do think should have been asked weeks ago is why are we doing more random Siro testing? Yes. Why did that down to a private group of dissident I think sinner, right could be wrong academics from Stanford. I mean, why wasn't the government doing this large scale by? Weren't we buying tons of tests from V code? So we would know this stuff. We could have been shut down for a week. While we were dealing with, you know, the worst case scenario, then we would have been aware of what was going on. But in terms of just the reaction, I guess what I'm saying is I don't think the reaction is all that unreasonable. I would have wished for more in depth reading of the papers. And I think if Trump had some elite quants on his staff at the top levels that might have happened. I mean, you keep saying things like Jared Kushner's in charge of this or that initiative, it reminds me Everyone bush was having these guys that had just gotten out of elite Christian colleges run whole cities in Iraq. And I'm not sure how good a job they did. But anyway, you could wish for more reading of the papers you could wish for more serology. Testing. I think if someone tells you 3 million people are going to die, some overreaction is understandable.

Pete Turner  37:05  
Yeah. And also who wants to be the person who has to stand up and give those briefings every night and make the call? And that's that's the hard job. Whether it's Gavin Newsom, Cuomo, any governor, any major city mayor, it's not an easy job because you need people like Jared Kushner to be next to you because you trust his judgment and his ability to go out and get you answers. But also you need experts who aren't full of shit. And look, you can't. I talked to early on and talk to a, an infectious disease professor here at a local very well known University. And that person said, this might be like a nasty flu. Most likely he put the caveat in there, like, you know, we'll see, but protect young kids protect old people and, you know, ride this thing out what was his initial immediate response? And that's proven to be other than the young kids. That's proven to be relatively accurate because it turns out that's what he does for a living But you cannot find agreement with that outside of his profession, people have lost their minds at a lot of ways.

wil reilly  38:06  
Yeah, I mean, this seems to be something where so there's a lot here, I mean, a one sentence way to put it as an American society is getting softer. So most people have no face to face experience with death or with serious competition. And if you read about this, like, the traditional sort of initiations into manhood or womanhood have almost disappeared. So I read recently that a smaller number of men than ever before are competitive varsity athletes through high school and then a smaller number of men than ever before going to the military, which used to be mandatory. And I would suspect that you could probably add to that a smaller number of women than ever before have a child late teens, early 20s, which is itself a pretty graphic process. I mean, that's not it's not just you hugging the baby at the end. If you've ever been there for that. I would suspect the same. Thing violent physical fighting, you know anything even going out into business and your own people are doing that to the extent that they used to. I mean, one of the provisions of Obamacare that's just widely applauded is that you can stay on your mom and dad's health insurance until you're 27. Through your 26 years, I understand. So I think when you took people that have been raised in this society and said something that throughout most of history probably would not have been all that surprising, which is, you know, less than 1% of the population might die through an entire year. The reaction was sort of an extraordinary panic rather than just people commonly saying all men die. You know, the sort of things that happened in the past. It's worth noting that if you look at those societies, Sparta Rome, the Han Chinese, the Manchu is certainly something like the Mongols were barely civilized. I mean, plagues would sweep through any good sized town, every couple of yours and killed two to 5% of the population. So we simply haven't had an experience with that. Most of are not warriors in the actual sense. Most of us aren't even trained athletes in the actual sense. Most of us have not owned a business and done something like produce shoes, starting with a horse skin, you know. So this thing that's occurred throughout history, just the idea of plague was absolutely terrifying to us. And it produced the response that we saw. I think I got it. Can you repeat your question about I think I get a little off track there. I think what I said is true.

Pete Turner  40:25  
Tech was my question. What my question was, is if you and I were to play five on five, basketball back in my basketball playing days, and we were governors, now, let me one of the critiques of your paper that we got online too, and I want to make sure you address this before we get too far away is defining terms of lockdown versus quarantine versus nothing. How much did that play into your analysis?

wil reilly  40:51  
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I think about writing. I'm with a guy named Dr. Steinmetz, you know, medical background and so I'm thinking about writing A serious journal piece on this, I've actually been in contact with another academic Christos makitas. And we might write something are related. I mean, I do teach you to stay do I'm interested in academic publication, I've talked to people that are at least as good as I am with, with ads or understanding these concepts. So if we did that, if something went into a JAMA, for example, to shoot high, I mean, you'd absolutely have to define, say, six different types of interdiction used by countries. In this particular for this article, I use a fairly simple definition of shut down and that is, does the state have a Shelter in Place Order in existence that mandates 10 or 12 specific things? There's a legal definition of that. If you didn't, you're not shut down. I mean, certainly in a social distancing scenario, you can tell people not to be morons, or jackasses there's nothing against the rules there. I mean, you can cancel a minor league baseball games. But I mean, if you go to Iowa, I mean, I would suspect most restaurants are open and if they're not, you can come in talk to a person then get curbside service. I mean, there are in South Dakota, the majority of businesses or open bars even have remained open, but it's going to be enforced that you stay a certain distance from someone. There's going to be a focus on people being in the patio, this kind of thing. I mean, that's not a shutdown. That's the alternative. I want to emphasize that nobody who is in that general scientific quote unquote, heterodox community but he's not an idiot is saying, we need to immediately go back to indoor raves, people who do that, because that's really no more risky than a tender date when you think about it, except perhaps the number of individuals, people who do that are taking an individual personal risk, and you can debate whether it is something they have a right to do. But I don't think that the government for example, should be sponsoring large county fairs or something like that. Social distancing implies staying in a distance and implies cleaning yourself and implies being polite to others, but that is in no way a shut down. So I just defined a shutdown as Shelter in Place Order in the state mandating the businesses shut down. If you wanted to go into more detail. I mean, there's several different levels whether or not you favor opening party venues and retail stores. I don't personally see much reason now that we've worked out how to use some of this protective tech this PP, that factories can't be open. I think that this decision to close the supply chain was just that a decision to some extent I think that that's reversible. But I used a simple definition for the short form article of lockdown or shut down that was just an SI p order a formal si P.

Pete Turner  43:31  
Charles Bartlett brings up a point of the Trump administration spent all of January in February downplaying the virus. And instead of mobilizing COVID testing programs, though, did everybody else this?

wil reilly  43:43  
No, that's a fair point. By the way, I think I think I've bantered with Mr. Bartlett online. It's not an idiotic point. I'm not a huge I don't have a magga hat on right now. But I mean, when people say this about Donald Trump, like Donald Trump absolutely did not take this virus seriously enough, that orange you know, blah, blah, blah. You have to put this in context. I mean Mayor Bill de Blasio on March the fifth encourage people to go out to the movies in new york city's public theaters and was recommending movies for people to see and bantering online and he's a funny guy apparently bantering online with people about these movies like I like an old school karate family kind of thing. I'm about to direct de Blasio book. But I mean, nobody expected. You saw a very rapid transition. Nobody expected. The initial projections for COVID, I think is how I would put that. So there were probably people that would have predicted what we actually saw a 60,000 individuals Secretary that have died so far saw, but the expectation leading into COVID-19 from almost everyone was that this would be the equivalent of a very bad flu season and this is not a nation of cowards, we shouldn't panic too much. And you actually saw versions of this attitude around the world. I mean, Italy, actually Had a semi serious holiday called hug Chinese traveler day. I don't think that aged extraordinarily well. But you have all these pictures of people in Lombardy and so on hugging Chinese guests and visitors and guest workers. And we did the same thing here in the United States. I mean, Joe Biden has a number of quotes along these lines like No, I wouldn't close the border. I think that's a subtle form of racism. If I have that correct. Nancy Pelosi said very similar things. People were accusing Trump of being xenophobic for trying to stop some of our kind of commercial intercourse with China. This is undisputed. This is part of the record. So just to single out Trump and say, well, Trump didn't take this seriously. I think his partisanship, nobody took this seriously because you know, you're one of the biggest secrets you can learn in life is that you never expect the serious bad or even good things that happen. I mean, a talented military opponent is not going to announce their strike before they attacked Pearl Harbor. I mean, a plague that's usually something that gets loose from a lab or a newly discovered species or something like that. You don't know about it. before it hits, that's why it's a play. You don't have time to set up protective barriers, get your peepee in place. And what we saw here was a pretty typical fractal unexpected event that you need to you're going to encounter in a leadership role. I don't think Trump handled it any worse than Pelosi any worse than Biden. I mean, remember where we were just a month and a half ago, they were up to Super Tuesday about how many Democratic candidate? Yeah, I mean, there was no unified front on COVID-19. I mean, candidates were accusing each other of not having international experience or having pretended to be Native Americans, just the usual nonsense. So I've no i don't think Trump did especially badly. I think in fact, if Trump had stopped all commercial exchange with China, we found out about this he would have been branded on a total brutal racist if we had escaped any harm from COVID-19. Because of that, it wouldn't have been recognized except maybe in comparison with other countries. And it would be used as a talking point against Trump in the election. Racist stops are exchanged with the Chinese are beautiful ally. Um, but anyway, The what? So there are three stages to the COVID-19 conversation first stage which may have been right was just wash your hands don't be a jackass. Second stage was post Ferguson, you can talk about pf and bf kind of like ad and PC. Ferguson said 2.2 million planet shut out. Then gradually as the methods community began to vet through that and other epidemiologist began to come out and so on, you started saw stage three where people are saying, okay, 70,000 people might die and again, wash your hands. But nobody expected that kind of fractal projection with the huge lump here.

Pete Turner  47:36  
Wouldn't when we look at the COVID ugly cousin or better, but somehow we made the flu and attractive thing nowadays. I don't know what happened. But we as a nation, we don't rush to the store to get flu shots. We don't practice constant hygiene. I've seen videos on how to wash your hands, all these things and the flu is reaping every year, we'll say at the low on average, 35,000 people right? And spiking to twice that sometimes a little more. We didn't act differently at all during these times. And I know the flu and COVID are not the same, but but they're Akin in terms of numbers and, and that kind of thing. And I want to add in another point I want you to get into afterwards, but it's also targeting very specific age groups and Affirmative. You know, like a bunch of young guys in the park playing basketball. Guess what? Probably I'm an I'm not a numbers guy. But when I look at the numbers in the age groups, it's like a thousandth of a percent that those guys are gonna die.

wil reilly  48:40  
Yeah, no, I will say I mean, I've been asked to play some five on five. I believe we both played a fair amount of basketball in life. And I mean, I say no, because the question is, if I do something like volunteer to help out a senior neighbor, is there a chance of getting them sick? That's the real question. But so you're asking about what are the demographic breakdown? For Kevin,

Pete Turner  49:00  
yeah, but also just like our treatment of the flu in general, you know, somehow it's become this no big thing. It still kills 40,000 people a year or so. And sometimes twice that, but we don't get flu shots. We don't wash our hands properly. You know, we avoid all these things, but somehow COVID this is that pandemic versus panic? No, toggle switch.

wil reilly  49:22  
Yeah, I mean, so I think this again, gets back into the like, I get very annoyed when people say, you know, nothing is worth a human life. I'm this sort of thing, because that's simply not realistic. Human beings are a predator species, Americans, at least traditionally, although we discussed whether this is still true, but a warrior society, all people will die. The defining fact of life which probably explains a great deal of the religious experiences that you are going to die probably in an unpleasant way. So in general, he says cheerfully, but I mean, it's just a fact of life. But I mean, so in general Have not dramatically changed our society in response to potential mortality level threats. You're absolutely right. And by the way, after looking at some of the stuff about how simple this is, like I had the hand sanitizer in my back pocket, I probably wouldn't be a little cleaner. And they do this in Asian countries. You know, the the masks are perfectly acceptable during flu season. I think we'll stop laughing at that. To the extent we did, but it's generally been a point of fun here, you know, I'm not gonna walk around like that. Anyway, whether or not a little more mitigation is useful. You're absolutely right then 40 to 50,000 people die every flu season. We don't lock up the country because we can't we know the flu is coming back every year. We don't have the luxury of a three month break. And the same thing is true of virtually everything. I mean, Heather McDonald commenting on this whole situation pointed out that you could save probably 50,000 lives a year by lowering the speed limit to 25 miles an hour. I mean, there are 45,002 at the upper end, going back a couple decades. 70,000 car crashes every year, the huge majority of those fatal crashes, the huge majority of those would be nice. fatal if you're just going 20 miles an hour, and that's still the pace of a fast horse or a bicycle, you could get to 90% of your appointments just fine. Why don't we do that? Because it would be an extraordinary pain in the ass.

Pete Turner  51:10  
Just if you mandated exercise instead of keeping people off the beach, like you will march 10 miles a day up and down the beach. Hey, a lot less people are going to die.

wil reilly  51:20  
Absolutely. You simply ban all forms of tobacco and tobacco. I mean, half a million saved tomorrow. We don't do that because we're not a dictatorship. That's that's the one sentence answer. And this is where the political scientists and the former military and espionage guys in the psychologists really do have a role to play by saying, Well, look, there's more here than just a simple question of lives and mortality. things other than life have value. Um, I was talking once during the gun control debate a couple years back when Marco Rubio was being hauled into CNN and unfairly pilloried and all that and a friend said, Well, I know you like your guns. You You know you're good shot, you teach people how to use weapons and so forth. But you know what that you do with your guns is worth the life of even one human being. And I just thought about it. My response was, Well, me and 10 million other people hunting with our sons or daughters. I mean, it's like that's a thing that has value. If you banned firearms, that experience going out for deer season with everyone in your family gone, that experience of going to the range gone, the ability to shoot a rapist in your house, God, none of these things directly relate to life or death. I mean, even if someone is assaulting your wife, they're probably not going to kill you or her, but it's something you'd probably want to prevent, right? I mean, so there obviously are levels of valuation that go far beyond simply money on the bank head for a life. And one of those analyses comes into play when it comes to our response to the flu. We just sort of stand up to the flu, we get a shot we go out in the world. Um, and you're absolutely right. This go well beyond even infectious diseases. I mean, the biggest killers in the United States are cancer, heart disease caused by obesity, tobacco smoking, you'd have to put unsafe sex in the top 10 I mean, we've almost forgotten about AIDS AIDS is still a killer. Um, so I mean, if you can have Tinder in the era of HIV, I don't necessarily see that the level of reaction we engaged in here was logical. Hmm.

Pete Turner  53:26  
And then what about the age group part of it? You know, the Oh, yeah. It's a whole lot of folks that should be working, you know, artwork and because of the, you know, it's just like we're not looking again multivariate. Right. Like we have different age groups. We have different demos. It's It's a shame to keep a lot of good working folks out of work, and then imperiling their financial future which ultimately could be their lives.

wil reilly  53:51  
Yeah. And again, this is this all has to be taken into account. I mean, if you So to answer your question directly, because obviously I can go on for a while, but some of the stuff One of the things that I think people have been very dishonest about with COVID-19 one of them is that we now know the actual see the actual CFR and IFR to some very real extent. I haven't seen a lot of papers modify the initial Doomsday claims from a month ago or mentioned that flattening the curve may well not be necessary if we've got a point 2% IFR. That's one of them. Another thing that people seem to be almost intentionally dishonest about is it COVID-19 is an extraordinarily age specific threat. I was looking through some data that Jane lingo my partner sent me and it was put together by some kind of center right media organization, but you can vet it against New York City data. It's absolutely accurate. You know, you talked about this with me on Facebook, we confirm that was correct. As I recall, I'm in the busiest day for deaths in New York City, the number of people are one of the busiest days by now. The number of people under 65 with none of a group of very serious preexisting conditions that died was 11 1101 111. Yes. And I believe that total was something like 1860. So the reality of COVID-19 is that when people say things like this virus doesn't care who you are, that's absolutely non accurate, right? Um, if you go with any accepted data, even the who, who data from China early on, and they at least had a presence in the country, certainly the US CDC age group data, your chance of dying of COVID-19 as a healthy person under 50, if you get COVID-19 seems to be between one and 400 at the high end and one in 1000. So that is the reality. I'm in Italy, they actually broke down who the average victim was, and it turned out to be an 81 year old person with multiple pre existing conditions. average age was 81. I think it's a mean average and 99% of those that Died had at least one pre existing condition. They just did this in Britain, I saw the Sky News release about it 95% of Brits age range wasn't that much different, and 95% had serious pre existing conditions. So I mean, that is who's at rest, you can say that COVID-19 is worse for those demographic groups than the flu. And we absolutely need to acknowledge recognize that. But the huge majority of people aren't in those demographic groups. We can talk about what serious PC means and so on. But I mean, the biggest risk predictor seems to be being over 65. That is a fact.

Pete Turner  56:36  
Yeah, if we allow it to be a fact. I mean, we just we can't stand it and it becomes a political argument really fast. What are the things I wanted to ask you about just because I know you have a good answer. The balance between defending our rights versus defending our collective lives, you know, we have demonstrations going on. Sometimes armed demonstrations going on, you know, we have the right to do that. But do we have the right to jeopardize one another with more covert exposure?

wil reilly  57:10  
I think that's a fascinating question. I mean, to some extent the constitution so the constitutional answer would be yes, but I discourage it. Right. So this gets into the difference between social shaming and dictatorship. Um, like I said, if I one of my boys asked me, Do you want to play five on five basketball? I would say No, and I don't really think you should either your girl is pregnant or you live with your grandmother. I mean, there's going to be you know, the kids are going back to school pretty soon. Think about this. Give it another week. That is social pressure. And as a result of that you don't see large parties going on during this situation, even in rural Kentucky areas where the police are not almost certainly going to crack down, maybe aren't going to find that location. Social sanction from the government is something a little different can the government Tell you legally not to leave your house. I'm genuinely curious. I'm actually going to look up some precedent cases today. My offhand impression would be no. Generally we have recognized that the government does have significant emergency powers during the quote unquote, great influenza 1918 1919. I mean, there were cities that mandated that people wear masks. There were cities that canceled things like pro baseball games, whether it was legal or not, nobody made a huge deal about it. I would venture to say that's over on the acceptable side of legality. What we're seeing now though, is there's a lot of writers on the right and center have pointed out not a quarantine, a quarantine is when you lock up sick people. And quarantines are allowed by law. What we're doing now is locking up healthy people who have a perhaps one in 1000 chance of having active COVID-19 whether you can do that is very questionable. I'm from the reading I've done I don't think this has happened in till now. And this seems to be when I said we're getting a little softer. This seems to be the extension Have something we've seen throughout society. So traditionally, the idea was that if you had a problem, you might get frankly teased about it, and it was your duty to deal with it. Um, if you were overweight, the guys on the team, were going to hassle you a little bit, you're going to eat some turkey sandwiches until you lost weight. I'm not saying I approve of this, but that is what would happen. Now we're seeing the movement against fat shaming, where all of society is expected to acknowledge that you have a perfect right to be somewhat obese, even in situations like coast class airline seats. That's a change. And you're seeing this across the line quote, unquote slut shaming, the idea of the rotating pronouns and so on in the transgender context, if you define that your gender identity is changing, it's not your duty to tell people that or even to say something like I'm feeling kind of Butch. today. It's other people's duty to ask you your preferred pronouns and title of a dress and so on. And in a much more serious version, we're seeing this here, the idea with the COVID corner Teams is essentially that if COVID-19 is very dangerous to specific sick, older people, they should not stay home, everyone should stay home, because otherwise it would be a friend an infringement on their civil rights to keep them in the house. And whether you approve or disapprove of that that is a new thing under the yellow sun. I mean, traditionally, in the past, I think that what would have happened, I know what would have happened is that seniors would have been encouraged to stay home, very strongly encouraged in many cities, and some kind of collective action network would have been set up to bring them food with gloves on. Now that we seem less willing to do that, the idea is that everyone should remain in the house until the threat to the seniors has passed.

Pete Turner  1:00:39  
The last thing I want to bring up is when do you take your foot off of the accelerator? It was going to be a two week incubation thing. We're just going to chill out. We're going to flatten the curve and it's like two weeks, five weeks, six weeks, two months, two years. It seems like we're afraid to say okay, let's start going back to normal life. I know we're in the process of doing It but that doesn't mean this isn't a complicated, scary, confusing time.

wil reilly  1:01:05  
First of all, I think there's a difference between normal people and the weirdos that spend all day on social media and get quoted on cable news. I mean, just living in a mid sized Kentucky city. If I talk to my boy and ask when they open up, are you going to be back in the dealership? So I can come by and buy a truck? He's gonna say, yeah, I mean, it's like, what I'm probably gonna do is and this is just a gesture of politeness to others, but probably take a basic mask and wear that around my neck. And if I'm in an area where I see people sure I'll take that over my face. It makes them slightly more safe. It makes people that are nervous, feel better, that's fine. Um, the odds of me not going to the gym, the range. Maybe the dojo I'm fat and out of shape. haven't been there in a long time. But I mean, the, you know, the store to get some food, the general steps you'd make as an adult individual is zero. Um, I mean, one thing I will say a lot of people have really overhyped What quarantine means now. So the rules are most shelter in place, or just Kentucky doesn't even have a formal shelter in place you have a healthy at home, but are things like Be very careful around seniors don't gather in groups of more than 10. You know, try to limit your travel to essentially the store and so on and get some exercise. So I mean, every couple of days, I mean, a normal person would be going to the market for a couple of hours or would be going out for a three hour run. I mean, so these people that are kind of lurking inside their houses, watching through the blinds and calling the cops on people walking, the dogs aren't really doing any good. It's a weird, anti French Resistance kind of snitching. And I think that the average person is going to be pretty happy to get back to normal life. The other thing I don't want to keep emphasizing this, we're not trying to pit the critical heartland against New York or any anything of notches, but you've got to understand it and you do. And a lot of these states there's very little risk. I mean, if you're looking at death, or what you could describe as Critical cases, I mean, Utah 46, COVID deaths. That's not only a big state, multiple millions of people Salt Lake City, that's also for most of the state one of the non lockdown state. So if you've got 50 deaths in your whole state, I mean, even those measures you are taking, you might begin to ask why don't we just wear masks and give each other a little space? Um, even if you go to the top 10 or 20 states? I mean, you're talking about Virginia 581. You know, Colorado 820 is the whole state, North Carolina big state for 19. So I don't think most people are going to be so powered by the prospect of 400 deaths and perhaps four times that many critical cases that they're going to remain locked in their homes. I think that's something that the media is for whatever reason, encouraging.

Unknown Speaker  1:03:51  
And go ahead. Sorry.

Pete Turner  1:03:54  
The other thing I was going to say was if you compare Utah's population three point less than five and you Compare it to where I live Orange County three point less than five on any given day, there's 3.5 million people in either state right? 50 deaths in both places. One is exceptionally denser, and one is a lot more spaced out 50 deaths. And they're trying to not let us go to the beach here. This is what we do. It's why we live here. You know,

wil reilly  1:04:20  
that's idiotic. I mean that, you know, I rarely would give such a blunt critique of state policy, but the idea that you shouldn't be out in the sun six feet from other people is the dumbest thing. It's a whole lot. I think that there's who is the old British king that stood in the ocean and told the water to go back because the people didn't deserve it or whatever King Canute. I mean, it's a lot of this kind of crap. Like if there's an old line from one of Hitler's marshals. The average man's gate is a goose step. And what that means is that many people are in intimate terms, let's say subs, many people like to be told What to do, they like to be able to look at the face of a commanding leader. Um, in leadership situations, I've learned that one of the most effective things you can do is just look very calm and laugh sometimes. And people like this idea someone knows what they're doing, hey, the boss, you know, this $10 million deal probably won't fail, leaving us all homeless, you know, whatever. It's people like someone to make that confident. projection of authority, and the people that like to make that confident projection of authority often have some jackass potential, and go way way overboard with it if they're not held in check by other free citizens. And I think that this is one of the things that we're seeing with these these Governor's proclamations Jesus, like one of them that Jane read to me was you can go horseback riding, but only alone. If you have a second person with you. They can't be in the same train of horses, like they can't have the same horse. Um, add up.

Pete Turner  1:05:57  
I mean, almost by default You're six feet away from someone, if they're on a horse, a horse is a horse, three and a half feet wide, almost by the time your legs are on there and everything.

wil reilly  1:06:07  
It's just silly. But I mean, it's that kind of thing I think is so first of all, I don't think that there's been a dramatic difference in deaths between OC and Utah. And I do think that the overreach of presidential and gubernatorial power is a serious problem. The scariest thing about COVID-19 to me is not the disease, although I'm perfectly respectful of the disease, of course, is the realization that in response to a potential loss of 100,000 lives, most Americans willingly gave up virtually all of their civil rights. I mean, for a month, people agreed to be confined to their homes. I think we were pretty good about it during the first week of this before a lot of data came in. But the question is, could this happen again, will this happened in the climate change debate, for example, where people will say, you know, there's a project From the Imperial College or the University of Michigan, this many people could die if we don't do this now we need to do it now. Um, Will people simply a seed to that and later find out that it perhaps wasn't necessary? it what are the what are the threats that killed more than 100,000 people per year? I mean, you could argue racism, probably, yeah. Guns over certainly a two year period. Um, opiates. I mean, in response to any of these things, will we be told that it's time to jump on board with you know, team Kentucky or whatever and not make fun of my state and, you know, USA Korean team, and, you know, again, sacrifice some liberties from security when it comes to sacrificing any liberties for security. I'm pretty much with Ben Franklin. It's not a wise thing to do.

Pete Turner  1:07:44  
Yeah, yeah. Well, and the thing is, is because of our self selection to this country, and how we all got here, for the most part, you know, we're not gonna take it we're gonna be like, Okay, great. You know, we gave you this one. You guys overplayed your hand. Next I'm going to go out and work on my crossover because I got to get by people, you know, my drop step isn't getting any better by not practicing, I'm going to be in the park. You know, people are just, it's like we tell South Floridians to evacuate from their homes during the hurricane. What? Or South Louisiana. They know what to do. They're already prepared. They're not going to leave. Because most the time the hurricane doesn't come and when it does, they need to be there to take care of their shit, you know?

wil reilly  1:08:27  
Yeah. And the the flip side of that is that every so often there is Katrina and not only are their losses that also then becomes the rallying cry for why you need to give up your power to the government. everyone forgets the 80 hurricanes that never made landfall and they all remember the people standing on the roofs, you know, waving pleadingly at helicopters. Even then, I mean, I'm not at all going to comment. I don't know all the details. Yeah. But I mean, I would suspect in fact, I know numerically, there have been a pretty significant number of people that when the water receded, just walked in North out of New Orleans and got away from Katrina. That's I mean, you essentially get up into the high ground away from punch a train within a day. Yeah. But that, again, is rarely the story that's focused on. It's the very small number of people that were in genuinely helpless situations down where the levees broke near the projects. This is why you need to obey the big man. And there are certain things you just can't say in America. Like, if you make that choice and miscalculate, well, then you're going to die. That would be absolutely unacceptable to say that people can make that choice of their own free will. And if they do, there might not be as much of an intense attempt to save them. That's not necessarily even something immoral, but it's something that would be greeted with insane screeching in the us that

Pete Turner  1:09:42  
there were a VAT year 2006 and I'm memory here. So I don't know the actual number. But there were something like eight hurricanes that made landfall in Florida the same year. So the same FEMA that couldn't handle it in in New Orleans, handled it very well in Florida too. That's the other thing. It's like you Look at the government and you can expect them to give you help that you might not otherwise get sometimes. Hmm. And anything more than that it's unrealistic expectation, you know?

wil reilly  1:10:09  
Yeah. So this gets into, and by the way, obviously what I'm talking about New Orleans, I'm not saying we should abandon people are in the path. But I do think that people have the right to choose to risk death to some extent. Um, if I was a homeowner in Cajun country in Louisiana, and I was told that a hurricane was coming, I would at least consider just staying in the house, essentially fortifying that many of these are built on concrete pads with storm basements, waiting it out, seeing if it came at all. But the catch is, if I made that decision, I wouldn't necessarily expect the government to expend millions of dollars coming to get me. I would hope my hunting skills were on point until things return to normal. But I think people have the right to make that decision and to inform local authorities of that. I mean, in the case of COVID-19 at the most basic level, once we've got, you know, our beloved seniors protected once you've educated people on social distancing, if adult fighting age men and women want to go back to work and open up the body shop, and they say, Look, I don't necessarily need ventilator care and ventilator level care if I get sick, yeah, I'm willing to take this risk. I know you might not have one for me, but I think I can survive the disease and I know you'll do your best. I don't see an ethical way to keep that person in their house. I really don't I mean, I don't see that an adult armed citizen can't make that choice. And that's what people mean by the nanny state. I mean, so it's perfectly fine for the state to say, Well, if you do this, you're going to die, which is an ally in this case, but you'll be taking a one in 1000 risk of death and it's a dangerous, scary disease. But if someone then says, okay, you know, I've taken many serious risks in my life spent a lot of time in the third world, most of my relatives are dead, I'll risk death in exchange for all this money. Um, I don't see how you can Then tell them No, you won't. And that's that's that second step that we're now seeing. Yeah. And this, again sweeps throughout society. I mean, there were mass movements against bullying and fist fighting in high school. I mean, there are mass movements against military recruitment in high school and even college. I mean, there are serious proposals to lower the speed limit to 55. Again, what is it damn to the mayor of one of them, he was in New York. And actually, I mean, just like this guy was Bloomberg. But I mean, Ban soda pop, oh, my God, you can only get a 16 ounce soda, because otherwise you are risking your life. You don't need the mayor to tell you if you're out on a date that you can't get the 32 ounce before you go into the movie. I mean, these are not decisions government needs to be making. If your date things are a little factual tell you I mean, it's there's no we don't need this sort of constant invasive government presence. But I think that that's what separates COVID-19 and I'm sure we'll talk about a few other things but end of this thread for me, what separates COVID-19 from threats in the past isn't that it's much worse. No one who ranked COVID-19 ahead of the Spanish flu, I wouldn't rank it ahead of the 5758 Asian flu. It does fall a hit a SARS, remember what a threat that was, we were very lucky to stop it at around 20,000 plus the flu season plus pneumonia. Um, the difference now, between those three real cases I just detailed in COVID-19. To a large extent is the prevalence of this constant outrage media, where you have people on Twitter all day tweeting at the president with stories about deaths in their town, right. I mean, what do you have the media that's a 24 hour cycle? Could we win a war in this environment? I don't know. So that that that's to the credit of our troops remarkably, and even then you guys had to kind of cheat with the media. I mean, he's embedded reporters, I don't think we're gonna get into talk quite as much as they wanted. It was it would have been very difficult to have Vietnam level coverage or something like the Battle of Fallujah.

Pete Turner  1:13:50  
Speaking of combat things, too. You have to understand like the individual perspective of things if you tell me that there's a risk to my life. I've been hit by a tank. I've had bullets whizzed by whizzed by my ear. I thought, wow, that should have hit me, you know? So you tell me that I'm gonna get exposed to some kind of virus that's gonna kill me. Hey, great, you know what? Something's gonna get me like, my, my level of regard for my longevity is appropriate for a guy that wants to stay alive in middle aged but if it's my time, it's my time What am I going to do you know, I have not nine lives it must be 29 lives because there's so many things that have happened I had a rocket bounce down the road next to me that just didn't happen to have explosives in it. You try to tell me that the flu is going to get me great. Okay. I'm wondering what it's going to be. I'm not unkillable. I'm just saying that my level of panic about dying. It's like one.

wil reilly  1:14:46  
Yeah. No, I tend to agree. I haven't had those military experiences which by the way, I greatly respect thank you for your service and all the positive things people say I mean them. I mean, like when I grew up, I grew up in two murder capitals. I mean, I was born on the public. Southside Chicago grew up mostly on the north side. But when I finally ended up moving to the suburbs, I moved to the east side of Aurora because my mom was an inner city school teacher again, you know, great job I respect but we lived where she taught. And for the next two years after I moved there, I thought I was going to the suburbs. That was the most violent city in the USA, we had about 100,000 people at a time. One year I think we had 39 murders. The next year we beat that I'm a kid I knew casually was in a hotel room when members of a rival gang ran in and shot everybody in the room and the girls they were with. And these are just high school aged guys. This is being discussed on campus The next day, I was sitting on our track ones getting ready for practice, and we started hearing these pop pop noises. And I asked the guy next to me, what's that? And he say, turned around. I remember this quote said, Man, they bumped me to school again, and then just shook his head. Like that's a disrespectful thing to be doing. And then we just went and ran around in a lab. But I mean, so just the idea of death and of course, it's not comfortably being hit by a tank, which is pretty impressive. I mean, I know a lot of people hit by bullets tanks less so but I mean But there's this basic idea that if you are I mean, the majority of men used to have military experience so they're not necessarily your level. I mean, the number of people from working class neighborhoods like the Southside very high, at least it has been, you know, even things like auto wreck. I was driving when Jane and I first met, we were driving in downtown East Aurora, which is kind of hood. And this drunk Greek dude just hit us, like t boned the side of the car. Um, we got out kind of expecting to fight with him, but he was in no shape to do much of anything. His family ended up showing up, ambulances showed up. It was weird, because this is like the third time we've met. But I mean, in terms of the level of risk inherent in life. Yeah, I don't think you can spend all of your days panicked. You'd never drive a car, you'd never shoot a gun, you'd never have sex. None of this means again, you should round up 50 people and hold a COVID-19 party. But the basic idea of can you put on a mask and go to work? Yes. I think that the huge majority of people would do that. The question I have is why so many people are encouraging us not to. And I think that to some extent, it's just protectionism. Many of these people are doctors, they really do care. But I also think there's an element of agenda setting here, where people from Cliburn to Andrew Yang have said very openly, this is a great time to get national basic income through. This is a great time to really change some of these policies around disease care. And I think that that's only possible if people are scared enough. Maybe the goal

Pete Turner  1:17:25  
maybe well, my other goal here is to help you sell these books. So if you guys want to be uncomfortable and talk about or read about things you can't talk about, you should buy wills book, taboo. 10 facts you can't talk about to include things like white privilege, and does it does it exist or not? racial violence and does it exist or not? Those kind of things will is a fantastic writer, go to Amazon buy that book and you will read things that will make you mad at yourself for believing because if those the empirical evidence at you and I know you'll love it, I enjoyed reading it. And when you when the time you buy a book, make sure that you rate and review Because that really is the besides the dollar so that we'll get some that book beer purchased those ratings and reviews as they stack up that bumps the book up in the ratings and helps him sell more books and and that's one of the things that we want to do is support we'll because he's going big places and shoot man I I appreciate the hell out of you coming on the show today.

wil reilly  1:18:20  
Of course man, I appreciate you having me. I'm down to be on the show pretty much anytime we've done some pretty interesting ones and Todd Woodson Dan Crenshaw. So yeah, thanks. Thanks for bringing me on. Not much, not much more to say