ly skewing the average in a way that is misleading. And I think that's true. I would need some confirmation, but I think that's true.

But then some other smart people pointed out another problem with the model, and this is a pretty big problem, which is that the models say that after the end of the quarantine or the social distancing that our number of deaths will be way down. And that's the good news. You know, that it would trend toward zero. Except the experts say what happens as soon as you stop doing social distancing? The minute you stop, it doesn't just go right back up. In other words, if the social distancing is doing nothing but delaying the bump, you have exactly the same amount of deaths. You just spread it around. It's a good thing in and of itself because of hospital capacity. But does it affect the total number of people who die, or is that just going to be the same because there's just nothing we can do in the next 18 months or however long it takes to get a vaccination?

That's a pretty good question. And if you don't deal with that, then any of these numbers about total number of people who are gonna die are just nonsense because it's based on magic. And the magic would be after the social distancing is over and everybody just goes back to work, the magical assumption is that the pandemic doesn't just start right back in again exactly like it was. Why wouldn't it? There's no reason to. Not a single reason that it wouldn't.

But here's the hope. If we slow it down we can, first of all it's a gigantic big deal to slow it down even if it's the same number of total deaths because you at least can get your hospital capacity a little bit more under control. But maybe those other meds are a big difference too. Maybe we'll know more from the drug trials. So I would say that it's a stalling technique to find out which of the meds work. That feels like that's what that is. And I don't think that's been explained. So I think I'm explaining it to you better than the experts because you have to know what comes after. What happens when everybody goes back to work? If there's no plan for that, there's no plan.

All right. So Balaji Srinivasan has this suggestion which I think is pretty good. We might be in sort of a semi-permanent world where face masks are going to be important. So even after this pandemic passes we might have lots of future needs for face masks for, you know, a few weeks every year or something like that. And so Balaji says well, why don't we make them cool? You know, why don't you build some stuff into them? I got a high-tech face mask. Maybe it's got your phone in there. Wouldn't you like to have a face mask? I've always thought this would be a good idea, like a high-tech face mask, not a cloth one but something more substantial where you could put some electronics in it, whatever. Could you make one in which you could talk but only the person on the phone, and you've got a phone, you know, microphones in there, but only