 Hi, I'm Jay Fidel here. It's a Thursday and we're talking about Corona, Coronaville. What's next? We're talking about how it's getting worse. We're talking about how if you don't have a plan, make it up. If you don't have a plan, make a distraction. It's all the same. And so we have Stephanie Dalton and we have Winston Welch and Cynthia is away. So it will be the three of us today. Anyway, I want to ask you guys first something that Stephanie raised as a really important issue is the information that we've been getting from multiple third party sources about the number of cases. All that CDC information that we've been used to getting from the CDC has now, Mr. Trump has redirected that to go to him to go to, I guess, it's health and human services, which is really him. And I guess that's going to happen very soon. But what does it mean? But what's your reaction to that, Stephanie? Well, I'm very frankly concerned about not having data, data and further driving our information into fantasy land and completely uninformed. So without the data coming through, I also feel threatened by that because I don't know what's going on here in my own state of Hawaii. Presumably, I won't even know that unless he decides that HHS can allow the public to have it. And so I think that all of us are in tremendous jeopardy. We won't even know that if we fly into Houston, Texas, we're going into the middle of a mess of virus, viral infection. So I'm quite disturbed by this and looking forward to hearing that it will operate in the same manner that the HHS Health and Human Services contractor will put the data up in the same manner that it's been allowed to be public currently. I also question whether what's been helpful to me is to be able to look at CNN and see the box on the screen. They run that box continuously so I can see what is the global circumstance. That's of concern to all of us too. And then to know what the nation is doing. And then of course, intermittently, they list all of the countries and the hot spots for the breakout of the virus. Are we going to have to be without that information? Don't know, but I'm sure that even if CNBC or MSNBC and CNN can't carry it any more, Fox will have it. That's not normally joking. Now if you look at the state of Hawaii website, I think it's the health department website, you will see the numbers for the state, the numbers are new cases, total cases and deaths right there on the website. And that's where we get them at ThinkTech. And we put them on our daily email advisory. Now the state also has national numbers and we get those national numbers from the state health department website. And we put them also on our daily email advisory. But I think you may be right. It may be more difficult to get the national numbers. But Winston, why did this happen? What is the reason for this? They didn't seem to be a problem about the data up till now. Why is it being shifted out of the CDC? Not only is the CDC not the primary recipient, it's not a recipient at all. He's redirected all this information away from CDC and to himself. Well, that's just it, isn't it? Why is he redirecting all the information? When does, why would a president need to redirect this information away from the world's preeminent experts on this and marginalize his own expert in the White House, Dr. Fauci, and treating him as a pariah, when in fact he's just been trying to give us, trying to give us unbiased medical opinion as best as he can. It's all about power, control, and also not letting people know. So like Stephanie said, are you flying into a super hot zone? The public will figure it out in other ways. They will demand local informational control from states, from municipalities, where there is still some level of, as I was reading today, small d-democratic control, and we will compile information and statistics. But the reality is that, I mean, you have people, I was looking today, where they're storming meetings, demanding they're right not to wear masks. And, you know, these are a giant conspiracy theories and all kinds of news. But even if it is a giant conspiracy theory, can we wear a mask for another six more months or another year? It doesn't seem like it is, but even for those folks, I don't know, they're getting such wildly different pieces of information and it's being fostered right at the very top. So it's concerning at a minimum that the ability to get news is being so distorted at the top. But we will compile it and we'll find out. And corporations, companies, they're not going to send their workers willingly into hot zones and travel zones because they're afraid of lawsuits. So we've got a lot of space to go here yet. Now, I think it's easy to get around this. I mean, you know, we could, the three of us could establish a website with, say, 50 states or maybe 200, you know, jurisdictions say. And we could either call them, every one of them, every day with a few staff members and get the numbers and punch them into the website. Everybody in the world would see that. Or we could have them punch it in because the website is a website and then everybody could see it. So it's not hard to get around it. And what would be interesting is that the numbers you get from that are presumptively accurate and the numbers you get from Trump are different and presumptively less accurate. I'm sure they'd be less accurate. Well, Sanjay Gupta was saying yesterday that CNN, that that's exactly how they were doing it in the beginning days of the virus. He said there were, I can't remember how I said it, concerning delays from the CDC about compiling information, but he didn't feel it was, it didn't feel like it was malevolence, just maybe more slow in getting the data together. And he said the CNN was calling up every state and they were getting the data. So they're going to be going back to that as well. So we're going to be able to compile this information and do a direct comparison. It's just sad that this has happened, but it's just more of what's part of this. Right. I mean, if we ask the question why, there's no good rational reason except that the data are now being weaponized, that he doesn't want us to know. He wants to control and cherry pick the data so he can make his arguments about how wonderfully well he's doing, which will, that'll be tested for sure if he lies. Well, when he lies, because you know he will lie. And he's going to try to use that to improve his chances in the election coming soon. So we already know why, don't we? It's all about the election. As you said, Winston, it's power play, but it's very troubling. And I really wonder whether the people in the base who are so loyal and faithful to him, still at about 33% or so, whether they will get the message that this is a manipulation. I don't watch Fox News the same way the base doesn't watch MSNBC, but I tell you, I do check it out. I go to Fox News every couple of days with this thought in mind. I will watch it until they lie to me. When they lie to me, then I'm going to go to another channel, any other news channel. And usually, I'm able to get through about 15 seconds on Fox News before I find that they're lying to me. I'm serious about this. I could watch them if I felt that they were telling the truth. Well, that's your version of the truth. Remember, we have alternate facts. And when you have 40% of the nation or 50% of the nation relying on that news channel for their facts, then your facts are the alternate facts, because those are the true facts. So what you're spewing is global conspiracy to design to, you know, I don't know what it's designed to do. It's insane when you step back at it. Well, I find it remarkable that this country, this great country of ours, we've been raised with that can tolerate a president who lies and cause, I mean, even a little lie, but here we have black lies all day, every day, and distractions, which are also lies. And we have his administration lying for him. And all the people around him lying for him. It's so easy to see that. But unfortunately, his base doesn't see it. So there are 22 states that are spiking now. 20 states. And, you know, we have, we have predicted this because we saw everybody violating the rules about social distancing. And we knew, you know, with all these rallies and events on July 4th, and people who refuse to wear masks and think it's their constitutional right not to wear a mask. We knew we'd have spikes and we're having spikes. And I don't know whether the people in those base places picked that up. That's pretty obvious, isn't it? You don't have to have numbers from the CDC to know that there are 22 states that are spiking have already spiked. Well, I question that. I don't know that I'd know that. And on this business of the lying, it's Trump's want to lie. But what I think is going on on Fox is its omission. I think it's there's lying. And then there's also omission of information. So that I think that I was thinking that the data was going away and then it would be omitted from any communication or reporting. And then, Jay, of course, you said that they would, they would cherry pick it and then transform it into whatever that message they want to send. But I'm very concerned about that. I haven't been that systematic in my study of Fox versus CNN. But I do know that I never hear anything on Fox about the breakouts, except very occasionally. So I had the experience as I talked to somebody from Phoenix, Arizona was out here had no clue that Phoenix, Arizona's hospitals were totally ICU units were completely full and that they were putting two people in one bed at one point. So that that affirmed that there's not enough information. That does affirm it, Stephanie. And you're right. If we, we may not be able to get that information about the 22 states, not so easily when this, you know, all these cases and death information are being redirected to a place which will use it only to help Trump. God, that's really disgusting and filthy and corrupt. It's, it's, he's a demagogue and he's going to do anything he can to win. But here, let's talk about Georgia. Let's talk about Kemp. You saw that Winston. Can you tell what happened? Can you tell us what it means? It means that the tell what happened. People may not know that the governor would not, let's see, he said that he would not allow state cities inside of a state to enforce a mask requirement, which I mean, okay, if the governor doesn't want to do it, can the cities not decide to do that? You're having incredible power struggles, but this is also part of, it's like, there was a great article from Michelle Goldberg, which I'd love to read from, but in the New York Times recently called in some countries, fairly normal life is back, not in America, but it talks about the coronavirus is a natural disaster, but the Republican Party's death cult fealty to Trump is holy man made. So this sort of contagion of conspiracy theories or your constitutional rights to infect other people or whatever it is, or just not, just a lack of concern, even if you're protecting just a few people from this is, and it's not a few people. It's massive, tens of thousands of people being infected every single day, and this is a virus with very serious consequences. This is not the flu, and people will point to that, and that's, I think, where people get confused as they say, they're showing numbers. This is how many people had the flu. This is how many people have coronavirus. The flu does kill people, but this virus, we don't know even what it will be like, what is going to happen three years, five years, one year down the road. Is it going to cause cancer, make people sterile? This guy, Kemp, is alone. He's the only governor in the country that has done this. He's invalidated all these orders for masks around his state, and he is a Trumper, a complete Trumper. This is an expression of loyalty to Trump. Yes, it is, but he got slapped down. Quite remarkable. You remember that, but the thing is mayors can come out and say, I may not have the force of law, but if you love your fellow mankind and humankind, please, I implore you to wear a mask, and if you don't, then you are a sociopath, given all the information that we know. We have the CDC headquarters right here, but even if people don't listen to that, guess what? They won't be able to go into their Walmart because Walmart has banned this. The corporation's ordinary stores are stepping up and saying, you don't have a mask, you can't come in here. It's still chaos. We have chaos at every level. For example, I hope you can help me with this, Stephanie. What is going on with Fauci and the credibility wars over Fauci? Trump has got members of his team or whatever you want to say, his cabinet attacking Fauci, and then he makes these ridiculous statements that he still likes Fauci, and Fauci is trying to tell the truth. What's going on with that? Why? Why? Well, I think that, as we will learn from the book, and it's selling like proverbial hotcakes, but that the man is sick, so this is not a normal person. Now, he's losing in the polls, so his political instincts are telling him he might have to change something, but everything that he's deciding to change is the wrong thing. So the wrong thing is to take the data away and hide it, and the wrong thing is to go against the premier expert on earth on infectious diseases. So that is all coming back at him. There is commentary on that, that's making people uncomfortable, and that's driving his part of the driving of his numbers down. So he's constantly making the wrong choice because he's so unable to get back and be thoughtful and contemplative and analytic about it. What about the possibility that he's just trying to create chaos and confusion? He is. The same way he's trying to do that at the voting level. And he doesn't want you out there getting anyone else getting any credit for knowing what to do more than he does, and even though he doesn't know what to do and isn't doing what he should do, that is enormously available anywhere he wants to stick his head to a person or on the internet. Liz, this is what you do under this crisis, and this is what you do, Mr. President. He has done the first thing. So Winston, have you taken a look at Mary Trump? You know, I have just read the excerpts from her book, and it's pretty devastating, just on a human level of what went on in that family. And there was someone who gave a comment, and he said, what I didn't really expect was her level of empathy coming out of all of this. That she's not, she's just, she's not mean, and she's not trying to be mean. She's just saying, this is the conditions that created this person, and he is a danger to the nation. And, you know, when you were talking about earlier, how does this happen in our great nation? How have we centralized power so much that one person can control so much of our nation in ways that are detrimental? And I think as after Donald Trump, we need to look at that and put in much better breaking mechanisms that actually existed before this, but that were just reliant on goodwill and common sense and about norms that have just been run roughshod over. Because, you know, I read the same, I read the same pieces, the same paragraphs out of the media, which was covering it last week, you know, when the case was first result. I'm afraid I haven't, I haven't heard her, and now that the restraining order was lifted, I haven't heard her talking on the media. But I do have the book. I ordered the book in advance, and I'll tell you why, because I thought that a little media was going to, you know, repeat the juicy parts of it, like that he got somebody to stand in for him on the SAT test and all that. I wanted to, I wanted to see how she handled the dynamics of the family. And that means, you know, how she recited their interactions together. I wanted to see how she wrote about that. A, she's a very good writer. It's very readable. It almost reads like a novel. I mean, it's just very readable. The other thing is, you know, you get something in the book that you didn't get in the media, that you didn't get when they read their special juicy parts. You get how a conversation went with this man, and how bizarre his conduct was in every single engagement, the crazy, really crazy things he would do in a group of people. His social skills were so low. His attitude was so arrogant. His engagement with people was so bizarre always, even when she was a kid. And that's something you got to read the book to get. And yet it's worth reading the book for that. And yet he has captivated the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people in this nation and abroad. And that is truly fascinating. So, you know, and what's, what's not remarkable, what's remarkable is that every American family, every family has its difficulties, you know, whether it was the father that beat you, the mother that beat you, the divorce, whatever happened, the deaths and the traumas, the poverty, whatever, or luxury. But, and most people come out of it, normal human beings. Something happened here, and I don't know what it is, but the ability to have people follow his message and his messaging is really astounding to me, still after all this time, and everything that we see. But remember, you're exposed to a very different media than most people who follow Donald Trump are. They may give cursory glances to the other side, but they have bought into this program hook, line, and sinker. And how it's going to come out after Donald Trump, how we're going to disengage that and get back to sources of truth and something that we all trust is the real challenge. So I think we need to be looking beyond that, and Stephanie is not going to have to get beyond that. One thing is, I was so impressed with one guy in his campaign in 2016, guy's name is Brad Pascal, Pascal, Pascal, something like that. And he was, he was on 60 minutes more than once this guy. And he's young, smart, American product on computers and the like, social media. And he was invaluable to Trump in 2016. And then Trump elevated him to be his campaign manager, top guy in the 2020 election. Well, Pascal was in charge of the rally in Tulsa. And Trump blamed him for the fact that 6,000 out of 100,000 people showed up. And he blamed them for all the pushback he got on the fact that these people were getting sick after it. So he fired him. Yesterday, day before he demoted him, but that means fired him. And he elevated somebody else to be his campaign manager. Just another firing. There have been 450 firings in this administration, just like the apprentice years ago. It's a, it's a compulsive thing. And it's all related in one way or the other to, to COVID. So Stephanie, what do you get out of this? Pascal, brilliant guy. It helped Trump in many ways. And now he's essentially out of the picture. Just like, you know, Trump doesn't meet with Fauci. Same thing with Pascal. What does this mean? That you've already answered the question. He's compulsive. And it's so what, as soon as one pops up, he's going to, you know, do, do the go, just hit the gopher back into the ground. And so, and recall for a while, Rachel Maddow was carrying a huge list in the back of her head. I mean, on the behind her head of all the people who had been fired. I mean, and this was in the first year, he had to stop it because the, but the title, the type got too tiny to be able to read it all. But anyway, so he's again, this is the notion. He's going to come back to haunt him. You know, can he get away with doing this, this, you know, this compulsive firing every day, somebody else. Anything and everything, that's been proven time and again. So why are we so generous? Don't say we, it ain't me. I know it's not Winston. Trust in the systems, Stephanie. That's what you've said many times is that we believe that our system and it is a good system. It's a great system. We have a great nation and we are a great nation and we will survive Donald Trump and get passed. I just want to ask you guys one more question because we're going to run out of time and that is, and that is this, you know, we've been working on vaccines and you never get the information about the vaccines from the White House, because I don't think the White House tracks on the vaccine research, but that's just me. But yesterday, it was revealed that the Russians have been hacking into our vaccine research in this country and in other countries too. And you know, I don't care. This is me. I don't care if they get, you know, the trial information, although that would probably be a violation of privacy. I have a feeling they're violating lots of privacy that way. But and I don't worry if they get the data, so what? Not going to help them that much. But what I worry about is that they would muck up the data. They would hack in and change the data to screw up the trial and give us a vaccine that doesn't work or worse, that hurts people. And I, you know, again, Russia. And so this comes out. Do you hear a peep from Trump about it? This is like the, you know, the bounties. You hear about the bounties? Pretty sure that happened. Trump doesn't say boo. Now we have hacking. His own intelligence agencies are telling him he has hacking into our research on vaccines. What did he say? Nothing. I don't understand this. It's like he's got a blind spot. He cannot do anything about COVID. And I think, I think he probably recognizes, he was not a good student. He probably recognizes that he's incapable of doing anything about a complex problem like this. So he changes the subject. What is your reaction? You first, Winston, what is your reaction to that? You know, just a line from Michelle Goldberg. She says, nationally, such responsiveness to the virus is gone. No one expects the president to do his job or to be held to account when he doesn't. That's how, you know, the country was broken before coronavirus ever arrived. So if we don't expect anything, we won't be disappointed. Whatever comes down the pike that is a disaster, we have to do workarounds and find new methods and systems. And we're very resourceful people. We will get beyond this. I have full confidence. There he goes again, Stephanie. I do. I hear the violins. I want to believe that we will. We will survive the virus and we will see the weak spots in everything as we do a debrief, a real debrief where we're all on the same page. What part of that do you agree with, Stephanie? Some of us will survive. And my heart is heavy for those who will not. And for all those of these huge numbers that may not have had to go, but went because there was no national plan because there was no this, no that. So my heart is heavy for them. And also for all of us who might be in that group going forward. Because we got six months here. And who knows what can happen along the way in our individual situations. And so anyway, I'm very worried about everybody for that. All these Americans we might actually use, who need to be here to make the corrections and clean up the mess. Well, a mess it is. One thing that troubles me, and I don't want to make this the last part of our discussion, is that there are those out there, and they're usually Trumpers who say, let's do herd immunity. Of course it didn't work in Sweden. Let's do herd immunity. Because if enough people get it, we have to pay a price, a percentage of those people will die, maybe one and a half, two percent, depending on what country you're in and so forth. The problem with herd immunity has been revealed, is that there has been a medical finding only a few days ago, that you can get it twice. Herd immunity assumes you get it and you never get it again. Not true. The whole antibody thing is being debunked. You can get it twice. So that means you think you got herd immunity, you don't have herd immunity. I mean, this really requires global collaboration among researchers. It requires leadership by a single government, a single country. We don't have that. And for the lack of it, we are all, all of us. You can wear a mask all you want, but in the end, you run the risk every time you go outdoors of having the aerosol near you. So it's more than just saving yourself, it's saving the community. And I don't think we have that without the leadership. Craig, final comments. You first, Winston. We don't have the leadership. It's not going to happen in the next six months, but it will come out in different ways. So just like, you know, we will come together under a new president who provides some global leadership and allows science to function again so that we can conquer this virus. But in the next six months, we got to fasten our seat belts because it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Stay healthy. Okay, you can, you can agree or disagree, Stephanie. What do you think? Welcome to any Republicans that will help out and do their duty and take care of us by constraining these, these compulsions that this leader man has. Please, we welcome anything you can do. I mean, love the Lincoln project, don't we? Go Lincoln project. Thank you guys. Stay, stay healthy, stay well. There'll be so much more. You know, I want to just say this is the leading story in our time here at Think Tech. It's the leading story in every media, whether it is or not it should be. And it's the leading story in the world, in our world that we live in. It is more important than anything else that we deal with this. And I hope we can. Thank you, Vincent. Thank you, Stephanie. Great to talk to you. See you next week.