he year. But if we're in January and we've got these antivirals—I don't know if they can produce enough of them fast enough—but if we had them in January, what would be the argument for any ongoing restrictions?

Now the argument of course is to reduce deaths, but if you can reduce them by 50 percent, isn't that going to be enough? I mean, we keep doing things that reduce the risk by 50 percent. How many times do you have to cut it in half before you're okay? They've been irrational for a while.

Long-term effects unknown. Correct. Long-term effects of the antiviral drugs unknown. Long-term effects of getting COVID unknown.

Hey, I have a question for you. I'm just going to put this out there. So we keep hearing about all of the so-called long-haul COVID problems. So people get COVID, and let's say they have a bad case of it, but then for weeks or months they have symptoms. I'm just going to put this out there because the range of symptoms seem pretty broad.

Have you ever had a surgery? So I've had three surgeries, none of them super major, right? I had a couple of nasal things, etc., some polyps in my sinus. And so none of them were major surgeries, but each of them required anesthesia. How long does it take you to recover from anesthesia in surgery? And I don't mean that day. I mean how many months? Have you ever had a minor surgery? It takes months, doesn't it, to feel right even after your problem is completely solved? You know, whatever the actual cutting was about of the surgery, there's something like a fog that somebody says like a year.

Right now last year, or actually during the pandemic, I had some surgery that was delayed for months and months and months. Many of you know the story. Had some sinus polyps that needed to be removed, and so the surgery was delayed. And part of that delay put me on prednisone. So I got on prednisone for a period, and then I thought I was going to go from that. And the prednisone reduces the polyps in the meantime until you can get the surgery. Then the surgery got cancelled, delayed. So I got on prednisone again, a second dose within a year, which is sort of a lot because getting off prednisone is kind of a problem. And then I had it a third time. So I believe if I'm remembering right there were three separate extended periods of prednisone.

It took me months to be able to walk upstairs after I got off prednisone. Months. And I was in good shape, right? I mean I was a gym rat. And just the prednisone—it wasn't even the illness, and it wasn't even the surgery. But just getting off prednisone, if you have too much of it, it's months. Like I would get to the top of the stairs and I'd be like, "Ah." Now it's fine. I can run upstairs easily now.

Prednisone is a steroid, right? Don't you get prednisone when you get COVID? Isn't that a pretty normal prescription? Am I right about that? And if you get prednisone, do you get it long enough that you have the problem I had? Because I don't think they give it to you that long, right? Because I was on it for a few weeks I think each time. Yeah.

So here's my question. How many of what people are reporting to be long COVID, you know, months-long symptoms—how many of those symptoms are caused by the treatment or just recovering from a bad illness in general? If something just knocks you on your ass, whatever it is—it could be just a bad regular flu—don't you have lasting issues from that? Like a few weeks later you've still got some problems. I don't know. I'll just put that out there that a lot of the reported long-haul might be just the trauma of the experience itself.

All right. Let's go Brandon.

All right, I need a little help here. A little help. I would like to employ the global brain, calling on all viewers to be part of a single intelligence. I'm going to set you up, and then your global brain will be unleashed, right?

Have you noticed—and this is not my original observation—that "Let's Go Brandon" starts with L-G-B as in LGBTQ? Can we think of the T in the Q so that "Let's Go Brandon Total Quality" or something? I don't know. I just feel like there's some way to make a meme or a joke out of this, you know, with being respectful of course to the LGBTQ community. Don't want to insult them unnecessarily. But it's a weird coincidence, isn't it?

Oh, there it is. Somebody already has it. The show. There's already a T-shirt. LGBT. Let's Go Brandon. Team. Let's Go Brandon Teachers Quit. Totally Quit. All right, I'm looking at your take. Qualudes. Let's Go Brandon to Quantico. Too Quantico. Okay, I didn't quit. Let's Get Brandon to Quit. There we go. Let's Get Brandon to Quit. That's it. Oh, it's already a shirt. It's already a shirt. I'm seeing a video of it here on the Locals platform, so you can't see it here on YouTube, but over on the Locals platform they're posting pictures of it. Yeah. Let's Get Biden to Quit. Actually says "Let's Get Biden to Quit."

All right. Here's a segment I call "Citizens Doing the Work of Governments." You ready for this? Citizens doing the work of governments.

So what's our big problem? It's the supply chain, as you know. And I'm going to read you a tweet thread because I want to see where you see an example of a citizen solving—maybe we don't know if it's a solution yet, but certainly it looks like leadership from citizens as opposed to government.

Now the question is who's in charge of the supply chain problem? Biden? Buttigieg? Anybody? We don't know. But Ryan Peterson, private citizen and CEO of Flexport, who is in the business of logistics and stuff for shipping. All right, so here's somebody who's a CEO of a shipping logistics entity and so therefore has an understanding of the big picture, right?

So Ryan Peterson tweets the following, and I'm going to read the whole tweet if you don't mind, because normally I would summarize it, but I don't want to get anything wrong. And I think that this is important not only because you can see a citizen doing the work of government here basically, but you'll get the whole little picture. I'll just read it.

All right, so this was tweeted yesterday by Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport. He says, "Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport's partners in Long Beach on a three-hour tour of the port complex. Here's a thread about what I learned."

All right, so the first part is he went in person, right? He didn't read the internet. He went in person to talk to the people at the port.

All right, so I keep asking, can anybody explain what the problem is? And nobody can, right? Have you noticed that nobody can explain what the freaking problem is exactly? They think it's drivers and all kinds of stuff. Well, here's what he found out.

Okay, he goes to the port. He goes, the ports—I guess we went to two of them—the ports of LA and Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full three-hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded. So in three hours they only saw fewer than 12 containers get unloaded. Okay, so did you think it was about trucks? All right, we'll keep going.

There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only seven that were even operating, and they seemed to be going pretty slowly. So it's not cranes. Got lots of cranes. Okay. It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers. And he'll say later that's mostly empty ones, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It's a true traffic jam.

Because it says right now if you have a chassis—so that would be the truck with nothing on it, with no empty container on it—you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they're not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis. Meaning the government. Here it is. Government problem.

If you can't get the empty off the chassis, you don't have a chassis to go back and pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed. Ask yourself, have you heard anything like this until now? All of the news you've read, all the people speculating—has anybody told you this? It's the first time I heard it. I'll go on.

With the yards so full, carriers slash terminals are being highly restrictive on where and when they will accept empties. So I guess you can bring the empty to the yard also. Containers are not fungible between carriers, meaning one carrier can't use somebody else's container. So the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal. This is causing empty containers to pile up.

This one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now. 450 trucks they can't use that are perfectly good trucks, presumably with drivers, and they can't use them because they have empty containers on them and no place to put them because of government regulations. You see where this is going.

All right. This is a trucking company with six yards that represent 153 owner-operator drivers. So he has almost three containers sitting on chassis at his yard for every driver on the team. He can't take the containers off the chassis because he's not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than two high in his truck yard.

This was tweeted yesterday. Today the mayor of Long Beach just announced that they're going to allow them to pile the containers more than two high. So this government regulation that looks like it was at least in Long Beach—so we don't know about LA yet—but it looks like they'll pile them high. With the chassis all tied up storing empties, they can't be returned to the port. There are no chassis available. Blah blah.

And with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can't unload the ships, right? So they're literally just too many empties. They just can't unload the ships. And so the queue grows longer. Now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers are waiting offshore. The line is going to get longer, not shorter. This is a negative feedback loop. You know, so the worse it gets, the worse it gets, I guess.

All right. How do we fix this? So now he talks about solutions. Now when I talk about the solutions and when Ryan Peterson talks about the solutions, here's the attitude you should take toward it. Not necessarily that this is the exact solution, but directionally. Okay? So if you can tell yourself this is a directional area to go, you won't get too wound up about the details of it.

He said what we can do that's fast—basically he says when you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. So here's a design note. You have to choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you.

So he's saying it's poorly designed by its nature. You should always choose the most capital-intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck. Now he doesn't explain that, but capital intensive presumably means it's easier to flex your capital. In other words, get more money than it is to get more people or more anything else. I'm guessing that's what it means.

In a port that's the ship-to-shore cranes. The cranes should never be unable to run because they're waiting for another part. So the most capital-intensive part is the cranes, and they're not running. So that means it's not a well-designed system. So the bottleneck right now is not the cranes. It's the yard space. So we've got to get rid of those empties.

All right. And he says that. And here's somebody who knows what they're talking about, right? So he knows systems, and he knows this industry. So listen to this advice. In operations, when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't design for it—so in other words it's not in the crane area because they designed for it, I guess—you must overwhelm the bottleneck. Overwhelm the bottleneck. In other words, you don't want to peck away at it. You need to basically just drop everything and throw everything at the bottleneck.

Okay, so how do you do that? He suggests an executive order—in other words Biden—effective immediately overriding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high. Looks like we got that 24 hours later. I don't know if this is just because of Ryan's involvement, but I do know that the government heard about his tweet the day he tweeted. So I made sure that at least some productive people in the media and in the government were aware of this and are very aware of it and are looking into it, etc.

So I can confirm that productive parts of the government are looking into this, and maybe this is why it happened fast. I imagine that it doesn't happen that fast. So in my imagination probably they were already thinking about this, stacking up the containers, and it just happened. So that's good news.

Then Ryan says two: bring every container chassis owned by the National Guard and the military anywhere. So if the military and the National Guard have trucks that they can carry different chassis or that they can carry different containers on, to employ those. Create a new temporary container yard. So you need probably 500 acres, he thinks, and it could be government land or something near the ports. So you need a ton of land temporarily, ideally temporarily, somewhere near the ports.

How hard would it be to get 500 acres available on short notice? Well, if it's government land, maybe that's fast. They can say just use this government land. What if there's no government land? Here's what I suggest. If this is really something we need, if we really need this for the health of the country, this is basically a war-level problem. It's a war-level problem. People don't act the same when it's a little problem as they do when it's a big problem, right? People don't act the same in the pandemic as they do when they get a cold.

So I believe this is a non-problem because if Joe Biden ever went on TV and said, "You know, we can solve this thing if we get 500 acres near the port," how long would it take a patriot, a farmer, a landowner somewhere—how long would it take at least one patriot to say, "I got 500 acres. Hell yeah, bring it over here. National problem. Whole country's in a jam. I got 500 acres. Absolutely. Just help me clean it up when you're done."

I feel like that's a very solvable problem in the context of a crisis. People would just step up, I think. Like I would like to think of that of my fellow Americans.

Ryan says also bring in barges and small container ships and star