 Yeah, welcome back to Think Tech. This is Community Matters. We're talking to our Chief Scientist, Mike DeWerke, today about the current crippling enumeracy. I'm going to leave it to Mike to actually define that term, and then you're going to handle on what we're talking about here today. Hi, Mike. Aloha, Jay. It's good to be here. Good to have you. So what is enumeracy? This is a term that we haven't heard much before. Yeah, it's basically numerical illiteracy. It's the effect that people can't do basic numerical reasoning, in which I consider a failure of our educational system. It's like people who buy lottery tickets because someone has to win. Never mind that the odds are one in 42 million, and they don't have 42 million weeks of life ahead of them in order to actually have a shot at winning. Well, isn't it also the press? Because if the press says, for example, that we have some side effects going on here, and let us tell you about the ones that will train your heart and your emotional stability about all these terrible side effects, that you're going to see that as a greater number, even though it may be only one. Right. Right. Also, we have this algorithmic curation of information where if you click on something shocking, the algorithms feed you more stuff like what you clicked on. So it's just... Yeah, people don't want to... It's hard for the average person to just go ferret out the real information. Ferret out the reliable information. It's very difficult. So it's understandable we've got this crazy amplification of rare side effects, an amplification of relatively rare breakthrough diseases. To take the trouble to dig into the numbers, for example, New York State, they have about 9 million unvaccinated people, 11 million vaccinated people, and they started looking at the rate of cases that the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated people get of COVID-19. And it turns out that if you're unvaccinated, your risk is 30 times higher, which is in line with the vaccine efficacy, 97% reduction of risk. So yes, you'll have... When you've got millions of people vaccinated, you'll have some people from whom the vaccine fails or doesn't provide sufficient protection. But the overwhelming benefit is that the vaccine protects people from the disease, like I say, a factor of 30 difference in risk. Well, there are these two sides to this enumeracy. One is that you ultimately are not rational appreciating the data. As a human condition, especially when you have a country of 330 million and a world of 7 billion, it's hard to get a handle on what that all means. It says demographics is what it is. It's data in the billions. But the other part of it is something you just mentioned, which I would like to dwell on just a little bit. And that is the echo chamber of social media. So if I... I'm in a certain group or I click on a certain link, then I'm going to hear it again and again and again, even if it's a really minor point. And that way, not only am I not completely rational about the information I'm getting, but the information I'm getting is weighted for me. Perception would probably be all this more of this than I thought. Yeah. And there's confirmation bias. You tend to click on the stories that confirm your preexisting biases. And so that further amplifies the problem. And then there's unscrupulous people who have an interest in sowing discord. You can imagine the Russians sitting behind their computers making bots that will amplify information that confuse the American people about the vaccine's efficacy of the disease. And you see the same thing with elections. Any little flaw they find that's ample. Oh, this confirms there was massive fraud when in fact this true statistic show there wasn't. And I don't want to pick on any one political... No, you can pick on the Russians if you want. I don't have to go a long way to imagine the Russians are actually doing that. Go ahead, pick on them. It's okay, Mike. Yeah, but we see this in all kinds of things. So we see it with investing where people think that they can pick the winner stocks, pick the 10 baggers and come out way ahead. And when statistically speaking, stock picking doesn't work. And we just passion to look at the numbers. You're better off picking an index fund and sticking with it. You'll end up in the top quintile of investors if you do that. That's been shown time and time again, but people still think that they're smarter than the statistics. So I think, for example, that I'm an average stock picker, which means I better not pick stocks and rely on it for my retirement. I better go into index funds. I'm an average driver. I know I'm not better than the average driver. So I just try to be careful when I drive. Most people think that they're better than average at driving, at stock picking, or whatever. And they'll click on anything that confirms their self-perception as better than average at things. It reminds me of Garrison Keeler in Minnesota Public Radio, where he said, here we are, and forget the name of the town, where all the children are above average. Right. All the women are good-looking. All the men are strong or above average. There you go, yeah. Yeah. And this kind of enumers its inability to reason numerically, even is effective in court cases or something called the prosecutor's fallacy, where, say, cops find some evidence, say a bloodstain at a crime scene, and they type the blood, and they say, oh, there's only 1 in 100 people have this type of blood. Oh, we got Joe Smith here who has this type of blood. Therefore, there's only a 1 in 100 chance it wasn't Joe Smith who did this crime. But then, when you look at a city the size of Honolulu, with a million people, a 1 in 100 rate means there's 10,000 people that have that blood type. So, really, Joe Smith's risk of being the one that was the culprit is 1 in 10,000, not 99%, and so that's a common fallacy that you hear in courtrooms. Now, that's a very, that's a exaggeration of the prosecutor's fallacy. They've gotten sparring to do it more subtly now, but it's something that can easily trip up beyond wary. It's kind of statistical reasoning. We don't teach people to think statistically. It's not natural for us. It's natural for us to imagine the worst, like that shadow in the dark, if it's a saber-toothed tiger, really, you better know it's a saber-toothed tiger and be ready. If it turns out there's going to be some shrubs, okay, no harm done for making a mistake. But when there's billions of us and interacting with thousands of people in our cities or millions of people in our states all the time, then the statistics start to become important and we've got to learn how to think statistically. Well, you know, it wasn't too long ago that the 300 billion people, 200 million people in the country was an awful lot. And there weren't many places around the world that had 300. You know, I read recently that in the time when I first came to Honolulu, there were 500,000 people here. That's a whole state. And it's, you know, it's nearly the end of that now. That was really good old days. Yeah, they were. And the good old days meant that this kind of, what do you call it, uncertainty about what the demographics were and what the probabilities were, you know, it wasn't in the same degree of a problem. And now, though, just as we have more people and perhaps more diversity or more people in divisive mode, which makes it harder to calculate what's going on, we also have artificial intelligence. And we have the data, we have the numbers. And, you know, that leads to the question of, so the average person, or maybe below average person has no clue about the real probabilities here. And worse yet, he's being misled, we should spend some time on that. But a person who is, you know, familiar with AI, a person who is familiar with data, like a scientist would take a whole different approach and looking at the macro numbers. And so if I were, I am not, but if I were a data person, a scientist person, an AI person, I would look at this, I think differently. But can you articulate for me how I would look at it differently? If I was, if I was not innumerable, innumeracy. Numerate. Yeah, you would think about it in terms of natural ratios, natural likelihoods. You try to, part of the problem is we don't teach statistics very well. We teach all this highfalutin theory that, you know, I'll base theorem on all that. That's very difficult to conceptually get in your head. But if you do things like say, for example, if you want to know, if you get tested for the COVID, and the test is 99% accurate, 99% specific and 99% sensitive, meaning that if you have the COVID, there's a 99% chance it will show you have the COVID. If you don't have the COVID, there's a 1% chance it will show that you have the COVID falsely. So now you have a million people supposed to just you personally randomly, just random out of the blue for no reason. And you test positive. Well, do you have the COVID? Well, you have no clue. I mean, if it was smallpox, you know the risk is zero, because even though the test was positive, we've eradicated smallpox and we haven't eradicated COVID. But so now you need to know one more piece of information. That is, how likely is it that the average random person in the population would have the COVID and say it's 2%, say 2% of people have the COVID. So now you take a million people, 2% of them, like 20,000 people have the COVID. And so if you test the population, something like 99% of those people, 19,800 would have the COVID, which test positive. So you have that. But then you test the other 900,000, 90,000 with a 1% chance 99,900 would show the COVID. So now your risk isn't that 99%. It's the 9900 that are false positives out of the million people versus the 19,800 that are true positives, or about two to one, you got about a one and three chance. Even if the fall, even if you test positive for the code of the 99% positive accurate test, you have about a one and three chance of having the COVID. And we don't teach people how to do this natural reason. And it's hard. It's hard to get used to it. Well, it is hard. It's hard with you right now. And I'm sure anybody listening, you know, I hope he's making notes. But you know, it's okay. You make the same message. But even that, it seems to me that the media who pronounces these numbers has a duty to explain them further. And when they give you a raw data kind of probability, and they don't explain what that really means, they're, they're lazy, be their ignorant about the real, the real world of numbers. And see there, they're really, they're really confusing people. And so I think the media has a duty to lay it out in more, what do you want to call it, understandable terms. And, you know, it could be also that there's a science here of doing that, of laying it out in understandable terms, we're giving the raw data. But the real probability is I'm sorry, you know, and then people won't be misled. Won't be. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's, it's easy to blame the media because they just throw these numbers out, then they move on and don't do any analysis. But they have the same educational problem the rest of us have, they've been taught statistics badly, they don't really understand. And they don't have time, we got to move on to the next story. But then I never go back and correct the record. That's what really bothers me about the media. Once they are informed of their error, they never go back and correct it. You never hear a retraction. And these kinds of, this kind of statistical reasoning is why they pay consultants in courtrooms to defend people or prosecute people, one way or another using statistics. You have to explain to the jury, in words, the jury can understand what the statistics really are. And it's the same thing with, say, in a different walk, cancer patients, you got to explain to the cancer patient, okay, you have this test, it's positive. Here's what these numbers really mean. Such, you don't unduly scare people, but you also unduly give them false hope. It's an art form. It's an art form. And I'm sure a lot of doctors know how to do this. They know how to present it in such a way so that they, you know, they're relaying the raw data numbers, but they're also explaining so that everyone is on the same page and so that you, you know, you don't have an error as a result. So, you know, I'm thinking also that, and that's the simple solution, if the data that we were getting was, in fact, true, you know, we could deal with that, we could have the media explain it further, we could bring interpreters like expert witnesses in cases, in court cases, and have them explain which, to some extent, the media do that, in my view, not enough. And Sanjay, be your doctor. Exactly. You got to pick your doctor about which one you're going to believe. You know, it's interesting. I guess I'm interested in, like your view of this, is we have seen, even till right now, till 20 minutes ago, when Nevada changed its mass rule because the CDC changed its mass rule, but not all the states have changed their mass rules. And so what you get is, you know, do I listen? Is what happened in Nevada? Is that persuasive? What happened with the CDC? Is that persuasive? And if they change it all next week, you know, I saw one of the cable shows where Tony Fauci was being interviewed and they said, you know, you were, now you say you were wrong before. Why should we believe you now? That's an unfair question. And of course it's a moving target, right? Yeah, being a rational scientist, I would imagine that Fauci would say, well, people will be honest about the vaccination status and mask up if they're not vaccinated. Turns out people aren't honest. They'll just, you know, if nobody's checking, they'll do what they want. You know, they may underestimate the risk. They may think they're invulnerable for some reason, but they, so it turns out that really you got to have a mask mandate and just make everybody do it because they're people who will just buy. And that's, that's a science too. That's part of human nature. You have to understand that people will lie in order to gain some kind of advantage or not lose a privilege or not be stigmatized. So if the government says, okay, everybody wears a mask, then that's great. Everybody will wear a mask when they're together indoors at the very least. Yeah, I went to a yoga class Friday and I, and I'm vaccinated. I thought everybody in the class was vaccinated, but then I get out and I read the article that says that the Pfizer vaccine is less effective against the Delta COVID than against the others. I was a dumb thing to do. I shouldn't have been in a room with a bunch of people, master not. Yeah, yeah, and there'll be more like that. There'll be more of these things than, you know, fly in from nowhere. And that was one, but there'll be there'll be others. And so much, you know, I would make the distinction between disinformation, which is intentional, or grossly negligent and misinformation, which is just, you know, mistaken, confused. You know, and that's the problem when you have a dynamic, like it's changing from week to week, the curve is going here and there. And the information is being incorporated by different people and different organizations. And then, you know, Trump's, one of Trump's worst mistakes, and trust me, Mike, he made a lot of terrible mistakes, was to pawn this off on the stakes. It would have been so much better to say to the CDC, we believe in you. Tell us what to do. We'll follow it. And in fact, have sanctions. I mean, that should have been clear at some point along the way. It's clear now. And instead of with this 50 states, different, different, liberty and information, information, liberty, meaning you don't get straight information. Great. So, you know, that was a big problem. And it still is because it is the culture of the response. The states, the states will have their own view of things. Yeah. And unfortunately, their states now are, they're actually deliberately, like shutting down their reporting process. They've stopped reporting daily case rates, under weekly case rates, or literally seem to be trying to hide the information, which is very unfortunate. There's, I've read about schools, for example, on the floor, where the principal said any teacher that gets vaccinated is fired. Beautiful. It's just incredible. It's insane. Or Dr. Carlson saying, if you see a child in this street wearing a mask, report him to the police, report his parents to the police. That child abuse. Yeah, we have a privileged culture in the United States where people think they're invulnerable because we've never had a major catastrophe. We're not one of those poor third world countries where these things happen. You know, in the third world, just people screaming to get the vaccine because they're dying every day. There's more people have died this year than died last year. It's not happening in the United States yet, although we're heading for a third wave. We're going to have a third peak in October if we don't do something different. That's a big question. Well, let's go to this question. I meant to ask you this weeks ago. You talk about people remembering, talk about the news, the media looking forward, but not back. We're not effectively back. I have this recurrent dream, like we used to have traffic. In fact, you and I talked about it. We used to have what? Tracking. Tracking? You're having the same kind of amnesia that I am. This is when you identify somebody who has a disease, and then you ask him, where have you been? Who have you been with? Like tracing. Okay. Tracing. Yeah, tracing. Okay. Sorry. Thank you. I know it's going back. It's going back in history. It's a year or more ago, with all this consternation about you're not tracing, tracking, you're not doing enough of it. And we have all this technology and there was this scandal at the Department of Health here in Hawaii using yellow pads to write this down. And you have a very limited number of people who are doing it and they're not doing it very well. And we need to have more of this tracing. If the trace every case, what happened to that? Disappeared? I don't know. I can't talk to the Department of Health how they're doing, but right now we're getting 200 cases a day in Honolulu in Hawaii in the state. That's low enough that you should be able to do contact tracing. I mean, you should be able to trace the contact. You should be able to get people to isolate. And we should be enforcing it. You know, you can require truck drivers to rest after they've been driving for a certain time. You should be able to require people to go home and isolate if they've been in contact with their COVID patient. How do you do that if they haven't taken a test? And they're not likely to take a test and prove they're sick. But by the time they're sick, they will have spread it, especially here in the reopening. You know, 200s of people, thousands, who knows how many. Even if you have no symptoms, you can still be shedding the virus all over the town. Yeah. I mean, the choice should be, we even know you've been in contact with a COVID patient. We can't tell you who it is, but we know you've been in close contact with somebody who's tested positive. You need to either get a test or self-isolate. That can be the choice. And then they'll play until they get sick or until it's been so long that they don't have the COVID. Well, you know, you can go down through CVS, MONGS, or any of the other drug stores and you can get a test and you can take it home, like a pregnancy test. It's just the other end, you know what I mean? And you can find out all by your own self, you know, whether you've been tested. The point is that it's cheap or free. It's immediate. That's free. Right. And so, you know, I don't know what the problem is. If I said to you, okay, you tell me that you don't want to, that you don't want to take a vaccine, we can get to the mandated vaccine in a little bit. You don't take a vaccine. So, all right, just bring me a current test, you know, like a week old maybe or less. And then you can get in and do your job at your desk. But if you can take a vaccine or show me by a test, which is cheaper free, and hopefully it's set up so it's documented for the date, yeah, the date of the test. And the person, I suppose, you want to be comfortable about that. That's glad you know what is doing this. David, yeah? University of Hawaii is doing exactly this. They're saying if you want to come to class in person in the fall, you've got to either be vaccinated or you've got to take a test every week. So, let me ask you, can we get to that? Let me ask you about the vaccinations. You know, we have a hundred million people in the country who are hesitant. And the pressure is growing on them, or at least theoretically it is. But we still have a hundred million people in the country. And they're a danger to us all. And they're like stone walls. You can't get through to them. And there's very few places where they're paying a price. I mean, I think it's probably going to be more the case soon about, you know, you can't take a train, you can't take a plane, you can't go to class, you can't go to work, all that. It's easy enough to do that. The federal government could issue actual guidelines for this, but it isn't. And so, you know, is that where we're going on this? Is that where we should go on this? And if so, and here's the real question, if so, how do you distinguish between somebody who has got a legitimate reason out of those hundred million? It can't be that many. We can get into enumerology again on this. Out of that hundred million, how many are legitimately threatened, you know, medically by taking the vaccine and how many are not? I would venture to say that the number of people who have legitimate reasons for not being, you know, vaccinated, tiny. That's not very scientific, but I believe it's tiny. The rest of them have no real reason. And so, but how do you make, how do you really make the cut off? Well, they can have a doctor's letter from a, you know, an MD, a licensed physician saying they have this condition. I mean, that shouldn't be hard to get. Now, in France, if you want to go to an indoor event, a concert, or something like that, you have to show proof that you've been vaccinated. Now, they're having riots in France because there's people who don't want to have to show proof they've been vaccinated. But, you know, that might be where we have to go. Now, I hope not, is one of a couple of things are going to could happen. You know, it could be that we'll just give up on it. And the disease, the grim reaper will take his toll and we'll end up with, you know, another million Americans dead. I mean, well, we're closing in on the 1918 toll. We lost 650,000 Americans in 1918. We're at 638,000 or so now. We could hit 650,000 in October if we don't, you know, start tamping this thing down. And then it could keep going because then vaccinated people and the virulence and contagiousness of the Delta variant, the Delta variant seems to have a natural end of six instead of three if you, if nobody's back, if nobody's vaccinated and nobody's masking. And that makes the Delta variant almost as contagious as measles, which is scary. Way more contagious than the Alpha variant. Yes. Yes. By multiples. By the way, I was thinking back to my Greek history, and we get Alpha, we get Beta. We haven't heard too much about Beta COVID. We have the next one is. Gamma. Gamma. We haven't heard too much about that. I'm not sure why not, but we haven't. Okay. Now we have Delta, Alpha, Beta, Delta, Delta, Delta, Gamma Delta or Delta Gamma. Although I know up to Lambda now, I don't know. There is a Lambda, but it's not as contagious or as lethal. But there could be another one and another one and another one. And my question to you, just my personal concern is if we have Delta and it's wrecking havoc the way it is in this country and other countries, and we have more cases, doesn't that increase the, back to enumerology, doesn't that increase the likelihood of another deadly mutation? Yes. An American olem. American exceptionalism. There you have it. Yeah. So that's why we're seeing these new variants in place through the vaccination rate is really, really low where the population is high and people are crowded like India. The more people have the disease, the more likely is the new mutation will arise. And the next mutation could come from Alabama. I don't know. The governor of Alabama, I think was just started urging people to go get their vaccines. She's tired of this. I mean, so they're coming around finally in certain parts of the United States that have been resistant before to realizing that they have responsibility to save their voters, you know. But I blame Trump for all of this. I'll tell you why. He politicized COVID and he politicized the vaccine, although he ultimately took it. And he made it was even in late in his term, he was talking about akin to the flu and sniffles and what have you, a million different reasons that he used to politicize it and my theory is the momentum theory. Once you convince the people about something, once the demagogue sells a package like that, it's likely to stick around. And so all this resistance now is a direct result of Trump's machinations. It could be true. I mean, there's a saying that what's more difficult than convincing people, what's more difficult than fooling people is convincing people that they've been fooled. Not true because they're invested. They're invested in being suckered in the first place. They don't want to admit they've been suckered. So let's talk about disinformation, about the motivations and the recipients. So we know that, you know, Vladimir Putin would like to, you know, sow disinformation here and everywhere in order to divide, you know, create divisive groups, sub communities, if you will, in this country and elsewhere, because his view of it is a zero sum game. And if I can make you weaker, then I'll be stronger. So we know his motivations and we can make a pretty good guess as to whether he or people acting under his auspices are actually doing that. You referred to it earlier and I think they are doing it. But what about all the others? You know, there are Americans and actually not too many of them who have huge influence in the social media and are responsible for some of this. Why do they do that? What gets them to do it? Well, that's it. They're incentivized, you know, in the sense that the algorithms reward you for the more clicks you get. You put up something shocking and scary that gets a lot of people clicking on that disinformation. Well, you get credit for it. In some cases, you get money for it. So it's algorithmic amplification of disinformation is really distorted our whole information economy, our whole system. And then there's people who, you know, they may not really believe the stuff they're saying, but they know they can get a political advantage, you know, curry favor with somebody else by successfully peddling disinformation. You've seen that before in history and we've seen people who go against their own social class as an interest to promote their own self-interest in doing things like this. So it really in human nature, it makes us to Jonestown and people who drank the Kool-Aid. And it's quite remarkable that at some level they knew they were killing themselves, but they were doing it for Reverend Jones. I mean, we got to try to hope that our better angels can prevail. I mean, you do have some people like Liz Cheney who are saying, look, this is truth. You know, I may not agree with the Democrats about much, but I agree that COVID is a problem. COVID is real, you know. Barry, but let me ask you this. You know, it seems to me that if somebody intentionally proliferates and that I include social media companies, but misinformation that results in the stickiness or death, it's really, you know, when you compress it all in the 21st century, in a world of millions of people, if somebody pervades information that leads to death, that person is responsible for the death. I don't think you have to go to a leap of logic, come to that conclusion. Yeah, that's you have a free speech issue, but yeah. Well, free speech is only relevant if the federal government bound by the Constitution, you know, is trying to affect free speech and the press in the marketplace and the public. But if it's you or me, then we had a relative just bought that line and then died, even in a red state, or bought a government official telling him or, you know, or, you know, somehow drank the juice, so to speak, then that person has a claim. And it's not a governmental claim, it's a personal cause of action or possibly it's a it's a it's a class action. Civil suit. Civil suit. That's not a First Amendment question at all. Yeah, and then the question is how do you win because you got to prove that the person make the A that you I've identified the source of the disinformation, being the source of the disinformation, Newell was wrong and peddled it anyway and did so with some kind of malice, you know, that's a very high standard unfortunately. Well, it depends on where the jury is. If the jury is in New York State, that's one thing. If the jury is in, you know, old home Alabama, that's another thing. But if you put you and me on that jury, I don't think I'd spend a whole lot of time deliberating. I would say you either knew or should have known that that information was wrong. You knew or should have known that that information would reach, you know, this person, you knew or should have known this person would buy or be seriously injured by the disease and would rely on the information. I mean, it's a it's a classic case of fraud and damage. I definitely defer to you on this. I mean, you practice law. Well, I'm just wondering if anybody's doing it because the government really can't or shouldn't get involved in First Amendment, you know, attempts to control speech. And that includes Congress. Although, I mean, I don't know who would object, actually, if Congress said something about you can proliferate misinformation, you can't do that. You know, people are dying. When do we reach the point where Congress takes draconian action? Is it 600,000? Is it a million? Is it two million? Right, right. Yeah. And then they've got to amend the Communications Decency Act to repeal the section that shields internet companies, social media companies from liability for disinformation spread on their sites. It's just too easy for Facebook to say, oh, hey, we, you know, we're just we're just the conduit. We're not responsible for the content. It's like, at some point, your algorithms are amplifying this. It's your algorithms amplifying who gets these who gets this information. So you bear responsibility for it. Yeah. And they're forever boasting how many billions of people are looking at them and watching them and being influenced by them. So if that indeed is so, and I think it is so, then they're responsible for showering these people with misinformation. This is a great test of the human race. Yeah, it is. And you know, I don't know if we're going to do any better than we did in 1918. You know, the people who went through this flu epidemic in 1918, they went around its course after several waves. They kind of wanted to forget all about it in a lot of cases because they behave shamefully. You know, you had husbands and wives who would refuse to take care of each other because they were afraid of catching the flu. You would have families divided up by this. You'd have neighbors who would, you know, just shun their other neighbors. Instead of helping, they would say, oh, go ahead and die. I mean, or they would just refuse to take precautions because they didn't want to have their ability to make money interfered with. So people behave shamefully in that pandemic. A lot of people are behaving heroically now, but also a lot of people are behaving as shamefully as before. And sadly, we also saw this with the plagues of the past where in certain cities, the vigilantes would nail the door shut if people had the plague and they would starve to death inside their homes. Tragic. And it's a dehumanizing experience. So the question I put you here at the really the end of Al's fro, Mike, is you must have some ideas. I mean, maybe they're changing ideas, but at least this snapshot in time, you must have ideas about where this is going and more important. When is it going to end? And how's, you know, how is it going to end? I hate to sound pessimistic. I think Hawaii, we have a shot at getting everybody enough people vaccinated to where we can shut down the pandemic. And a certain other states to do, but I think the United States as a whole is going to end when people get sick from the disease and there's herd immunity from illness, then we'll have a huge overhand of long COVID cases costing our economy for decades. So we're going to see, you know, another, we're going to see tens of thousands more deaths in the United States before this thing's over. And then when it's over in five years, you know, if we don't get a new wave that's different from Delta and escapes evades vaccines and evades immunity, people will want to forget all about it. Forget all about how they did. Healthcare system will have been scarred and crippled. And people will be dead. And people will want to say, oh, no, we're not responsible for that. Let's just forget about it. I said, by guns be by God. It's like, uh-huh. It's no different than slavery. Oh, what by guns be by guns? That was 200 years ago. No, we're still suffering from, you know, the consequences of slavery are like long COVID. And centuries of repercussions and side effects and pain in our society. And that's what we're going to have with the cases of long COVID, not centuries made, but decades of people suffering from this long COVID and crippling long term effects, heart weakness, et cetera. And I can't be optimistic. And I can try to do what I can to get people around me to vaccinate where their masks take precautions, urge other people to do that. I mean, I have relatives in the Midwest or right wing who just don't believe that this is that bad. They don't think they should have to mask up to go to school. Like, you really understand the risk you're taking. And then they'll end up like the case you were talking about in Missouri where the guy was screaming for the vaccine after, as he was being intubated, because he couldn't breathe on his own anymore. It's like, it's too late. Well, the other, the other part of this, and it's worth another discussion, is that when you occupy the country, uh, on this issue, and indeed, if you, you know, watch television, read newspapers, uh, you know, this is what the country is occupied with. And this issue is fucking all the oxygen out. Um, you, you undermine political will, you undermine, you know, democracy, if you will. Uh, and worse than that, Mike, even worse than that is that we aren't spending any time on climate change. That's right. We really have to do that. We have to get back to that. We're not managing this. You know, it's like the rats are running in the store, uh, while the screen door is open. How about closing the screen door? And on top of it, it's going to exacerbate income inequality. You know, people who rationally get themselves vaccinated, they have investments. They're going to take advantage economically while the rest of the country is distracted and make a profit. It's like the hedge fund manager, you know, last year, early last year, he had a huge bed on the market going down and he got information about the COVID and he made a billion dollars. Maybe it was more than that. It was a huge number, but it's several billions of dollars a thing. And so, well, everybody's preoccupied with this debate over whether the COVID is real. You're going to have people who are taking advantage of that chaos, even our own country. And I'm not saying that it's always wrong. I mean, it's like in the sense that there are people who are going to invest in the market, seeing the trend, even though they have no risk. I mean, it's not their fault. They're not trying to hurt anybody. They're just saying, well, this is the trend. I better put my money in this part of the market. So they'll get richer and the people who are having to, who can't get away from having to face people, they have to go to work every day in a food service or something taking these risks every day with their lives. They're the ones whose income is going to be cut because they'll even have to quit their job to avoid the risk or they'll have to stay home, take care of their kids because they can't put their kids in school to take the risk or they have to stay home, take care of their elderly parents because elderly parents can't be put in a nursing home because of the risk. And the poor will just get poorer and the income of quality will just get worse. And that's the other consequence of this long COVID. In addition to our long-term problems with climate, democracy, well, also long-term problems with income inequality. An income equality leads to a deterioration of the supply lines. So even if you have the money, you may not be able to get a loaf of bread anyway, because the people who bring you the loaf of bread are the ones who put their lives on the line in the food store. You're right. Well, Mike DeWerner, a peace scientist. I think I'm going to have a drink now. I'm feeling a lot better. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for coming on, Mike. We'll do it again soon. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Talk to you later. Talk to you later. I love it.