The answers are in my latest Catalyst TALKS. We will need innovation from all fronts before we return to work. The answers and solutions will come from private sector, public sector and non-profits. The lessons learned might actually be hiding in past centuries. In my Catalyst TALKS with Doctors Beth and David Hawse we discuss several factors that will be a part of the return to work process. It’s a wide ranging discussion from taking samples from poop in our sewers to the the beer brewing process to Fonzi jumping a shark. Below the video itself is a transcript to allow you to search.
(BTW– This was a fast transcription with several mistakes. Thanks for forgiving me in advance)
Joseph Kopser (00:00):
The dogs barking. Alright. Alright. Was getting away. The dogs happen. Five weeks in a row with doctors and doctors Hawse. Uit’s actually pretty cool because you all were out getting provisions and hunkered down for whatever and life gotten away and we didn’t get to have any green room talk. So this’ll be a purest form and version. And by the way, Oh, Oh wait, I don’t even have a cool microphone plugged in. I’ve got it showing but not plugged in. Can I plug it in? I don’t know. Can you shucks, hold on. Okay. And now I have it plugged in, but can you hear me? Yes, we could hear you before. I know you like telemedicine. So we have a couple of things to cover today. Uwe got States that are returning to quote unquote normal. We have a white house that is talking about returning to work more than they are talking about the medicals.
Joseph Kopser (01:08):
Interesting to note that this isn’t a political show, but of course you can’t escape political because the president has been doing less briefings and more medical folks have been talking. But I also want to get into the discussion about there might be a new thing that we found. So let’s take it any direction you want. It’s what 18 minutes before your governor gets on and talks, took a day off today, his first day off. See that’s returning to normal. In fact in honor of Amy’s favorite place to go and spend a month like may. Can you see that? That says cinnamon shore. So we have been pretending like many Texans that we go to the beach and go to get the cool gold stream breeze flowing over us. Today was our day, which I’m giving a shout out to both daughters, all three daughters, both schools for all three daughters. I want to take it.
David Hawse (02:12):
So are you talking about the new antiviral that rent
Joseph Kopser (02:18):
Remdesivir? Is this a Gilead? Yes. Yes. Okay, go ahead.
David Hawse (02:25):
If you go back in the archives, we talked about it two or three weeks ago.
David Hawse (02:29):
That’s what I love. And our 20 year old step son, I immediately bought Gillead. Unfortunately. Wow.
David Hawse (02:37):
That’s a separate conversation. I, you know, I think the issue with it is the pro, it is very easy to have anecdotal information which pushes people in one direction or another. And you know, I think this in, in a situation where people are panicky you tend grab on to the positive and you tend to ignore the negative there is in medicine there’s a concept called confirmational bias, which is, you know people tend to like if you go when you have some intervention, right that you feel like it worked all right, you, you tend to be a big advocate for that. Whereas if you go and that intervention didn’t work, you don’t spend a lot of time telling people how it didn’t work. You’ve gone on to something else.
David Hawse (03:35):
Yeah. Confirmation bias. I think for all listeners they can appreciate as my hometown would that the university of Kentucky Wildcat basketball team is the greatest basketball team in the history of Texas. Longhorn fans rightly also believe that Texas Longhorn football is the greatest football team ever. That’s confirmation by it knows that it’s Kentucky. Well as long as we know that the data sometimes runs contrary and we tend to dismiss correct things that we don’t like, which is why we also will do confirmation bias with our ingestion of news feeds and people will stick to one channel or another. But I digress, but continue.
David Hawse (04:15):
So you know, I think the issue is this may pan out to be something that is really helpful. My guess is is that it will be one of many things that in combination with one another may turn out to be helpful. And this is the purpose of social distancing to a large point in that the more you can personally delay getting this, the more people are learning, the more the medical establishment is learning and the higher likelihood that you’re going to have a you’re going to have a positive outcome from this. Just because you know, the learning curve on it’s been so steep.
Beth Hawse (04:53):
This is, remember we talked about it because we talked about the who like the world health organization funding.
David Hawse (05:01):
You obviously call it the who and not the Joe. It’s kinda like the web.
Beth Hawse (05:08):
The HEB is maybe a Kentucky thing, a pediatrician thing, because when we use growth charts, we use CDC growth charts and who growth charts and sometimes we use CDC who combined growth charts and we manipulate the statistics. The only one
David Hawse (05:29):
Question who is on first.
Beth Hawse (05:32):
Yeah, exactly. But I remember when you talked about this, because remember the big trial of remdesivir. The inner, there’s an international trial, not just the one here, but that’s called solidarity. That is the who is in charge of that.
David Hawse (05:50):
He was talking about over a thousand different cases or participants.
Beth Hawse (05:55):
Yeah, I mean that would be what you would expect from any decent trial. I mean N, in we call that N, in, right. The number in a trial would be in the thousands are really, really good trials, you know, several thousand okay.
David Hawse (06:10):
So anyway, I interrupted you with some pretty corny jokes going back to a hundred years ago. The point being what does that mean for all of this? And David, you mentioned it just reinforces social distancing. It gives us more time. So what does it mean for everyday Americans when they look about return to work and return to a new normal?
Beth Hawse (06:30):
Well, it’s it. It’s a medicine. Even if the medicine does work, and I feel like a negative Nellie, but David and I were talking about this, it’s an IB medication. It’s not something like Tamiflu right now in its current form. Not that it couldn’t be, but we don’t know what the oral absorption is. There’s lots of those hurdles, right? Right. Now, people only get that if they’re really sick. So in other words, you can’t get it over the counter. You have the hospital, you have to be you right now, you have to be in a bad way to begin with. Right. So it might, it may be there again, it needs more study. You know? Does it help if you take it like Tamiflu, like the first 48 hours when you start to feel bad and those things haven’t been done. So it’s good news, but it’s not like, Oh, we’ve cured it now. Let’s just go do whatever we were doing. There’s, I think
David Hawse (07:19):
The issue that we get into right now is that we’ve been doing this for close to two months at this point. And you know, I, everyone wants this to end and the days are getting sunnier and warmer and prettier and people want to get out. Some people who enjoy their video games so much that they’re not pushing back. That’s true. But you know, everyone wants this to be over and sometimes, you know, when you get panicky to get something over, you make rash and irrational decisions. And you know, I think the big thing is, you know, my father who’s 78 and has some health problems was asking me the other day, you know, when can he get out? And you know, the thing and you know, I had to explain to him that dad, you know, if you get this, you’re not going to tolerate it very well. And although they are going to, you know, obviously the grocery stores are open, but a 78 year old with some chronic health problems probably shouldn’t be tooling around in the grocery store.
Joseph Kopser (08:31):
So I’ve heard it discussed among, you know, different people’s influencers and whatnot. Do, do we need to consider as part of the reopening of business in life as we know, age dependent, health dependent, demographic dependent, or can we from a government standpoint only do it based on geography? What are your thoughts there?
David Hawse (08:48):
I think that’s complicated. I think when you get into ICL, you know, the government has a hard saying, Oh, if you’re over a certain age you shouldn’t go out. I mean they can make recommendations and I think they are making recommendations that if you have chronic health problems that you shouldn’t be the one that’s going to the grocery store. And that sort of thing. You know, I, I think that there are some exciting things out there that are gonna help, but there was an article in the New York times today talking about the natural course of, of, of, of illnesses that are novel. Okay. So that we haven’t seen before. And a few weeks ago we talked about smallpox and American Indians. And, and I think what’s interesting when I see all of this, it does look like children definitely get this illness. Okay.
David Hawse (09:42):
But it, but they tend not to get as sick as adults do. And it’s kind of like chicken box. If you get chicken pox when you’re a kid, you tend not to do as bad as when you get it when you’re 50 or 60 or immunosuppressed and that sort of thing. So I went back and I was looking at the data as far as novel viruses on, on naive populations. So what that means is a new virus to a population that’s never seen it, never, never seen it. And so if you take a tuberculosis, which is not a virus, but you take tuberculosis, you take measles, you take flu, and you take smallpox and you introduce that into North America and central America, that turn to 90% 90% of indigenous people in North America died from those three viral illnesses. And so, you know, the issue with all of this is this rush to get out there and fix this is, I’m not saying that 90% is the number. Okay, but even 5%, even 10% is just shocking numbers that, you know, millions of Americans would pass away. And that sort of,
Beth Hawse (11:02):
We’ve all been really lucky. You know, we, we were all, most of us born in a really lucky time. Like even my baby boomer parents had polio vaccine. You know, we’re not used to massive amounts of people dying from an infectious disease. I mean, we’re vaccinated against all that and we take it very for granted. You know, that we just walk around and we get some minor colds and we get the flu and that’s are really bad. So we, I think we don’t have, most of us don’t have any point of reference to realize just how bad this can be.
And I’m not saying I do, I’m just saying when I read things that are written by the adult medicine people like in New York taking care of this, by the way, you both are adult medicine people. I just want to point that out, but I do not like to take care of adults and I’m so happy it doesn’t look like that medicine. Yeah. I think babies smell better than adult smell better than sick adults. But yeah, when you read the accounts of that, I’m like, yeah, this is nothing we’ve ever seen. It’s nothing that like my generation of medical professionals has ever seen or the generation before us. And so there’s not really even any more experienced medical professional that we can go to and say, Hey, what was it like when you know, you didn’t have,
David Hawse (12:29):
Yeah. Can I provide a really interesting analogy, which is in 2001 when twin towers fell and it was like, Holy crap, we’re actually going to go to war. Prior to that, the only experience of people currently in the military was the one, let me make sure I get this number right. So people remember 111 hours of sustained ground combat in desert storm and the early nineties, 111 hours, some vehicles didn’t even have to refuel. That that conflict was so short. And then prior to that we did have Panama and we did have Grenada, but we certainly had among, you know, experienced senior professionals, Vietnam and they had some experiences to draw on. So maybe there was an entire generational shift. But what I’m hearing you say is in the medical community, there’s literally nobody alive.
Beth Hawse (13:30):
Yeah. We got nothing. Yeah., I mean there’s no one alive that has dealt with that. HIV would be the one thing would be the one thing that you know, was a novel viral thing that came in out and Nick made radical changes in, I mean, when was the last time your dentist was in your mouth without gloves? Well, it was before HIV. Yeah. Okay. When was the last time, I mean, you know,
David Hawse (13:57):
Okay. But to be fair, as Molly Molly Wood said on marketplace make me smart. HIV had a profound effect on how we think about sex or dentistry or promiscuous sex or unprotected sex. But we’re talking about unprotected sitting next to a person in the bathroom.
Beth Hawse (14:19):
Yeah. Respiratory is, it is a, it’s just a whole other thing of how many people you can infect. Like if it’s bloodborne, one infected person typically infects one other, but you know, and that’s what you hear people talk about about that are not, are getting the, are not down to one where one person laned in your first or second episode. And just to, just to put it in perspective, this always fascinates me. Measles is our 16 one in text, 16
David Hawse (14:52):
Other people. Wow. So when your pediatricians go crazy about getting the kids there MMR, that’s why, yeah.
David Hawse (15:00):
The other interesting thing in, and this is in the popular press and that’s the only place I’ve read it. But the other interesting thing that I’ve seen in the last few days is about, and this everyone’s going to think this is gross if anyone’s listening, but you shed this virus in stool. And so one of the things that they’ve done and they’ve gone into communities, there were some of this in the Netherlands where before there were any cases, they were getting samples out of the sewage system in in these cities. And then they started seeing it.
They started seeing this develop or they started being able to identify the proteins in the sewage system before there were diagnosed cases. And so from a tracking standpoint, that could be a radical thing in that you could start looking, you know, if they could start quantitating it and figuring out how much was in the sewage system of a city, you might be able to predict and say, you know, this is starting to increase. We need to go in lock down, or even as small as neighborhoods or sections of a city. You could possibly do that.
David Hawse (16:17):
Can I just give a shout out to Steven Johnson who wrote the book how we got to now, Beth, I think you even might’ve referred to this in a previous episode. His book, how he got to now begins with the history of modern world. But it’s a book about the history of modern world, but it begins with the study of clean and then study of London with the, with the curious professor scientist in the 18 hundreds who was trying to understand cholera and it was through clean water. And
David Hawse (16:51):
So the first real class in medical school that you start learning about disease is a pathology class that you take during your second year. And we were taking, we were, we did had a lectures, but then we had small groups. And my small group professor was a gentlemen named Darryl Jennings, who’s currently the chair of pathology is a great, just a fabulous guy, great teacher. And so Darryl Jennings at the, the very first small group that we had with him he sat down and said, now, before anyone gets a big head about being a doctor, I want to remind you all that plumbers have saved more lives than doctors ever will.
And that is a fact. Make more money than doctors. That is true as well. But clean water and dirty water out of a community is, is a huge thing. And so I do think that we’re learning some things as being able to target and track this illness in a way that, because what I’m talking about is like right now we’re struggling testing lots of people in a community. Whereas if you can go down and get one little vile of fluid out of the sewage system and then you can go and you’re testing a whole community and then you can target testing in that area. Unity, you can target testing in that community in order to what we’re doing.
Joseph Kopser (18:39):
We’ve talked about contact tracing. It’s going to be one of the most important elements of this. A lot of communities don’t have the money for it. A lot of technology firms trying to figure out Google and Apple for the first time in their company’s competitive history. You’re talking about working together on a system, but you are, but maybe I’m misinterpreting this, but what I’m hearing is we might be able to just send people down into sewer, set up some kind of monitor and may maybe get a handle on where it’s going and who’s got it.
David Hawse (19:12):
I think you can get a handle potentially on the level of disease in a certain community. And then target resources, assuming that we could arrange some organized way to use medical resources in this country, which I am not holding my breath on. But that’s a separate conversation, but you could theoretically target ventilators to a certain area, testing to a certain area.
You can start quarantine and stop quarantine based on that data and not based on how many people have died, how many people are in the ICU. And so when this inevitably comes back in the fall, if we can do this sort of thing, you can start testing and then say what the, the, the idea would be when you started seeing these numbers go up, you say, okay, everyone stay home for two or three weeks and as opposed to doing 12 weeks of this, which is really effectively what it’s going to be close to. And Kentucky, you might get two or three weeks or four weeks of it and do that two or three times, but that is going to be less detrimental to the economy than 12 weeks stoppages.
David Hawse (20:26):
Well, and that’s the coolest thing I’ve heard about this and which is why I love innovation. You know, the whole point of these conversations Catalyst TALKS was named after the book that Boyd and I wrote that, you know David, I don’t think you bought a copy of it.
David Hawse (20:40):
I did buy a copy. I have read some of it. Michael has read it all. However,
David Hawse (20:50):
I don’t have a signed copy. Oh, okay. You can get it right here. Shameless promotion, but I’ll grab it. Thank you. Everything that we talk about Brett Boyd and I, in that book is that if you’re going to make a decision about what direction you’re going to go, yup. First have to start with your assumptions. All the tools that you have, understanding what change is about. And what I’m hearing today that I never thought would be a part of the conversation of COVID is the importance of poop and sewer. Oh my gosh, look, I’m looking over at myself 10 seconds later and I just saw the copy of the book and David, I thought it was you holding it up only to be disappointed it was me. But they might not.
David Hawse (21:35):
I never thought that poop would be the answer. But here’s what we’re hearing today as as two five timers. That would be our gift. It’s a signed copy of a jacket or just a copy of catalyst. You’ll, you’ll get a copy of catalyst button by Amy. Yeah. So we’ll get a paw print from Flossie as well. I will say this though. What is so unique about innovation, how it happens. We can talk and I’d like you to give me a couple examples from medical history about our biggest discoveries came in ways that people didn’t even imagine. You know, my favorite, favorite example is GPS, which people don’t think about enough.
They hope their phone, they’re trying to use ways to go to and from a Google maps, but it was Sputnik. It was the threat that the Soviets posed, the 1950s that they first put a satellite up that the satellite had its own beacon system that allow the Soviet scientists to know where it was, but allowed American scientists who by the way, they were just doing it kind of like for fun or you’re going out like, you know, I can hear that thing and I can also hear it in California.
David Hawse (22:53):
And if I triangulate from New York, California, what time we heard it, we can kind of figure out where it was. And then they reverse engineered that technology and we got GPS. So that’s what innovation is about. This kind of a threat that is hitting all of us globally. I’m excited. So are there other examples and I’m putting you on the spot in medical history where we didn’t really expect the answer to come from this area, but boom, there we got it.
Beth Hawse (23:17):
I’ll give you one where I think you’re going to get an answer is one of our mentors is the head of pediatric immunology at Duke and he’s actually an HIV researcher. And he began his HIV B research. He was actually doing pediatric kidney research and they had this new virus that was they didn’t even know what it was and was these kids who were immunosuppressed were getting sick with it, but of course those kids were getting a lot of transfusions and it came to find out it was HIV. And since then has done a ton of HIV research. And in that vein is now doing, he was doing HIV research and now people are living longer, but he’s, there’s a question in HIV
Joseph Kopser (24:09):
Terry Bryant gives another regular reviewer, gives a shout out. This is very informative to the both of you. So Terry,
David Hawse (24:17):
One of the things about people with HIV is they get coronary artery disease quicker. And so the question is now been, do they get it quicker because of the medicines that we use? Because now it tends to be more of a chronic illness in people and not sudden death. You look at Freddie mercury versus magic Johnson, there was a bam, it changed all quickly like that. And so it, so it turns out because they’re both popular figures in pop culture history. What was the difference between triple therapy? What’s that
Beth Hawse (24:50):
Triple 10 time difference or, yeah,
David Hawse (24:53):
So there was, there was AZT I think was in the aid in the late eighties, mid eighties, somewhere in that range. By the early nineties, they had developed triple therapy, which is where they were using three different medicines,
Beth Hawse (25:10):
Just like random disappear. We’re, is that right?
David Hawse (25:12):
I using those three medicines, they were able to knock down the viral counts so low that it became more of a chronic disease. My point in all of this is Dr Sleasman started collecting blood samples in the eighties and still has samples from people with HIV in the eighties as those samples. And so they’ve gone back and it turns out that HIV may affect the way the way cholesterol metabolism crosses your gut which may in turn is turns out the leading cause of death in the United States, which is coronary artery disease.
And so somebody who started off looking in Raynel and in kids with renal transplant, you know, it’s now doing research on, you know, coronary artery disease and in, so, you know, the fact of the matter is we don’t, oftentimes we don’t know. And I think there are, there are groups out there who raise funding for a specific, you know, to research a specific illness and they limit their money just to that specific illness. And the problem with that is so much medical innovation comes from, you know, places that we didn’t expect it. And so like all cancer research really can affect other types of cancer.
Joseph Kopser (26:42):
Yeah. I mean, this, my shameless shout out for the fact that you cannot have simply a private sector solution or a government solution. I’m a big fan of the two working as John Stewart would say smartly together. Because we take so much for granted as I gave in the example of GPS or could be the modern internet, could be computers. It is only through government applying the money for general research, general scientific research. In other words, we’ll throw atoms together and figure out what comes out of it with low intent on commercialized.
David Hawse (27:20):
One of the biggest problems is when we start applying politics to science and we start saying, why are you doing studies on ants? Why are we spending money on research? Well, the answer to that is we don’t know.
David Hawse (27:39):
Right. But other things come from that and you know, and so getting into nitpicking, but in defense of those politicians who want to hold up a chart on the floor of the Congress that say we studied for $250,000, the science of ant procreation isn’t that an easy just foil that they can point to rather than a bigger problems that they might have in their own?
David Hawse (28:12):
That’s all it shows. That’s all it shows me. It’s just you weren’t a science nature. What are you doing on the science and technology committee? It’s like painting. It’s like standing on the floor of a Senate with a snowball saying there’s no global warming cause here’s snow. Yeah. Okay. Alright. We’re not trying to get, I don’t want to get into biotech to do our checkbook. I shouldn’t be put on a banking committee. There you go.
Joseph Kopser (28:43):
Okay, fair enough. But do you know the origin of the expression jumping the shark? Yes, I do. But I’ll let you tell the story. So there they were happy days. I mean is the greatest show of the seventies going into the eighties. They had more spin-offs out of happy days than anybody. And then with Fonzie they just weren’t quite sure where to go. And so they decided that he would get into like evil Knievel style stuff.
Joseph Kopser (29:11):
So they were going to have him jump over a big giant tank of sharks and in the TV movie industry. And I think John Barry’s backing me up on this. It was jumping the shark. And then after that everybody just said, okay, happy days is over. The spinoffs came from that. Joanie and Chachi, I mean, come on. It is literally Ron Howard, who later became one of the greatest movie director, producer people ever. So we can’t knock happy days. We’d just have to give tribute that even they wore out. Yeah, I digress.
This conversation we’ve talked, wait, what we didn’t finish about the London story of cholera when he was analyzing sewer and water and tracking patterns. He figured out, and I forget his name and if anybody’s watching that our members please correct me. Oh, John Perry says, Henry Winkler was a water skier too.
Yes, he was tribute to Fonzie. But what we forget about that story is, besides his name, was that when he tried to trace the pattern of where the sickness was and wasn’t he, was anybody living or working in the beer brewery in that neighborhood because they prepared, boiled and treated all the water or as a part of the fermentation process. Anything you want to add to that from a scientific or medical point? Amir, clean your water.
Joseph Kopser (30:42):
There it is. I’m doing my part to stay healthy by drinking beer is that it all comes back to beer. Okay. So we’re going to wrap up here. Five, 11 local time there where you all are in Kentucky. I’m glad to know that the governor gave himself a day off. He has been doing quite well from all I can tell. Anything on the data we were picking on Tennessee quite a bit in the early days. Anything between Kentucky and Tennessee and we want to say about the difference between their response and their rate.
David Hawse (31:16):
Yeah. I think the data that the data is really going to be interesting over the next few weeks on, you know, where the, the counts go up and down as you open up society. I, I will say if you give somebody with a common cold antibiotics and they get better, that doesn’t mean the antibiotics made it better. And so one of the things,
Joseph Kopser (31:39):
Or did that out before causation versus correlation, right, Beth? Yeah.
David Hawse (31:44):
And so one of the issues that you’re getting into is now where we are beginning to get into the time of year where respiratory viruses typically go away on their own. I’m not saying, I’m not going to say that’s going to happen with COVID. But I am going to say, I don’t know why would necessarily behave differently than other respiratory viruses.
So there may be a natural low coming up and as we open up, as we open up States, we may see these, these numbers not rebound dramatically, which would be a good thing. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to come back in the fall, number one. Number two, if they do start bumping up through may and into early June it’s going to be a long time,
Joseph Kopser (32:34):
Long time. A new normal. Okay. well there you go. I want to thank you on the Saturday afternoon for spending your time, David and Beth and the folks that tuned in live. I’m going to allow this to just live over on Facebook and on YouTube as what we call evergreen. And then I’ll add more links over time and figure out how to continue this conversation. The coolest part about all this is, and you to know this, but others may not know, is I’m not editing these videos.
These are just going on live and they’ll just live there. Sometimes I take the transcript and add to it, meaning that I actually add closed caption for folks that can follow along when they’re just moving along on their Facebook. But you two are doing a tremendous service for the community and I appreciate that and I appreciate you taking the time. Anything else to add that? I didn’t talk about that book all. I gave you a damn copy.
David Hawse (33:34):
Just buy it so that I can buy other beer, but then I gotta buy it and I gotta ship it and then you got to ship it back and I’ve already bought one copy. I’m just kind of know where it is.
Joseph Kopser (33:46):
All right, fair enough. Actually I think I bought a digital copy and it’s on my phone. Here’s my copy that is on the phone. It is on the phone somewhere. Catalyst catalyst. By the way, I just want to point out, I mean, could these hands be model hands? No, no body in the nails. There’s no issues there. I’m just saying for people that are in the modeling, my hands are available. You know what I mean?
Beth Hawse (34:14):
Once again, it seems like we’ve jumped the shark.
Joseph Kopser (34:21):
All right. Y’all have a good Saturday afternoon. Very bright and John fair for both of your comments. Y’all take care. Bye.
Joseph Kopser of Grayline Group is host of Catalyst TALKS. A series of live, interactive interviews with thought leaders, subject matter experts and operators with first hand experience in the skills needed to lead the workplace in a changing world. His talks focus on the technology, agility, leadership, knowledge, and strategy needed to build teams in a changing world.
Joseph is also co-founder of the non-profit USTomorrow focused on workforce readiness. Joseph’s focus is to help people adapt to the changing future of work Grayline Group knows that technology is changing faster than business models, and globalization has magnified the threat surface for companies, investors, and governments. Change creates opportunity and risk. It requires the skills of new leadership and strategy in the workplace. Grayline Group brings together experts, data, and solutions to help business and government leaders manage transformation resulting from technological and socioeconomic catalysts.
