Hi everyone. Annyeonghaseyo. That's it. That's all I can say. It took me an hour to learn how to say that. I watched a lot of YouTube videos to learn how to say that. What I want to talk about today is one of the five pillars of cryptocurrencies. Very good. Thank you. That works. You've probably heard me say this, but I'm interested in blockchains that are open, public, borderless, neutral, and censorship-resistant. Have you heard that expression? Open, public, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant. If you watched any of my videos, you probably heard me repeat that thing again, and again, and again, and again. There are the blockchains that are open, public, borderless, neutral, and censorship-resistant.  Very good.  Unfortunately, that word was apparently too colorful for Facebook. You can't say that word on Facebook. We only allow neo-Nazi content on Facebook.  Then there's that. How can you tell the difference between a blockchain and bullshit? There are a lot of companies that are trying to sell you things, and they attach the word blockchain in order to make their sale proposition more palatable. No matter what you're doing, they'll find a way to connect blockchain to it. My favorite example was Kodak. Do you remember Kodak? They used to make film. They invented the digital camera and then didn't use it or sell it for 20 years until Nokia destroyed their industry. In 2017, they launched a blockchain project. You can attach anything to blockchain. Let's try it. I say a word, and you say blockchain. Very good. Asparagus. If we keep doing this, people will start throwing money at you. Bus. Healthcare. Supply chain. It's very good. Already, we've created four startups that Google would probably fund. After all, this is called Google for startups this space, which is a funny name. I don't know what Google does with startups. Do they swallow them? Is that the idea? The idea here is that you need to be able to understand what's important and what's not important in this space. Because there's so much money flowing in this space, because there's so much opportunity, there are also a lot of sharks. In the business world, sharks can smell blood from kilometers away. In the business world, MBAs can smell VC money from kilometers away. If you put some VC money in the room, they're going to show up and start attaching the word blockchain to things. We need to understand what's important and what's not important in this space. How do we do that? I set up these ideas of what's important about the Bitcoin blockchain, why it all started with the Bitcoin blockchain, and what made it important, and how you can tell if something really needs a blockchain or doesn't. The characteristics of a blockchain are, in my opinion, open. It is public, borderless, neutral, and sensor-persistent. Let's talk about each one of those. Open means that anyone can access it, participate in it without authorization, without vetting, without anybody checking ID, national card, ethnic origin, or anything like that. Simply open. The funny thing about a blockchain is that you don't even need to be human to use a blockchain. That's not required. Software can use blockchains without proving anything. In fact, the blockchain doesn't know if you're human or a piece of software when you use it. Borderless, like the internet, there are no borders in this space. This is a truly international phenomenon. What that means is that it doesn't matter where you are, the blockchain is already there. It doesn't matter where you live, it doesn't matter where you travel. Sometimes I go through international airports, and by sometimes I mean every week. When I cross borders, they have these little signs on the border, and it says, if you are transporting more than ten thousand US dollars worth of currency, instruments, or convertible instruments, you must declare them. Which is an interesting question, because I have some bitcoin, but am I transferring anything? Am I transporting anything? Well, I have some keys, which are just numbers, and those are not the bitcoin. They are just my pin number. I look at the other travelers who are traveling next to me, and they are walking across the international border. They probably have a credit card or debit card in their pocket, and they are transporting that credit card number across the border. If you stop them and they say, are you moving money, they would say, no. But there is a credit card in your pocket, but the money is not on the credit card, it is in the bank. I just know the pin, so I am not transporting money. I thought that was a good approach. I am not transporting bitcoin, because my bitcoin is already in the country I am going to. Somebody downloaded it and put it there. When I arrived in Korea, my bitcoin was already here. I am just transporting my pin number. I don't want to have that conversation with an actual border official, because they may disagree about that analysis. I also try to make sure that if I have a wallet that has bitcoin when I am traveling, it has less than $10,000, so I don't really need to have that conversation. But it creates an interesting situation. You suddenly realize that all of our laws, practices, customs, and borders are based on a very simple idea. They are based on the idea that money is somewhere. It is either here or there, and if you take it from here and put it there, you are transporting. But what if it isn't here or there? What if it is everywhere? In that case, you are not transporting. Suddenly you have this really weird problem, which is that nobody who was writing that law could even think of money that was simply everywhere all the time. It didn't even occur to them. So none of that makes any sense anymore. What does it mean to transmit money when money isn't somewhere but everywhere? What does it mean to transmit money when money is simply a piece of information? For example, one of the demonstrations I did was I took a bitcoin transaction. I wrote a little script. I used Python. In Python, this was six lines of code. Using six lines of code, I took every byte in that transaction, and I replaced it with an emoji character from the Unicode set. The transaction starts with 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 3, f, blah, blah, blah, and hex.  Then I tweeted that. Did I transmit money? I don't know. I'm not quite sure if I transmitted money. I sent a bitcoin transaction as a tweet, consisting of monkey, banana, asparagus, broccoli, smiley face, frowny face, love heart. Is that money transmission? Do I need to have a banking license to do that? That would be very weird. But that's what bitcoin does. It creates these weird situations. Borderless. It means a lot more than you think of when you start realizing that money has become information that has no physical form, that has no physical presence, and does not exist in any place. It is not a thing of place, it is a thing of the mind. Okay. Neutral. What does neutral mean? If you operate a business and you want to transmit money across borders, you start having interesting conversations. Interesting conversations with your bankers. For example, I recently had my books translated into Russian, and I sold the rights to my books to a Russian publishing company, and the Russian publishing company sent me a small amount of money. It was maybe $500, something like that. It wasn't enough to buy a nuclear weapon. It's $500. So they sent me $500. Well, they tried to send me $500. It never arrived. And they said, I sent it. I'm like, okay, well, let me call my bank. So I called my bank and I said, where's the money? They said, we don't know. We don't have any money. I'm like, well, okay. So I went back to the Russian publisher and I asked them, and they sent me a receipt that showed that my bank had received it. And so I took that to the banker and I sent it to them and said, oh, our security department has stopped it. And they don't tell us. They don't tell you. They don't tell us.  No, we can't tell you because there's an investigation happening. Oh, like an investigation. This sounds exciting. Tell me more. So then they had some questions. Like, for example, who is sending you money? I said, my publisher in Russia. And why are they sending you money? Because I published a book. What is the title of the book? It's the Internet of Money Volume 1, you know, the Internet of Money. It's like, never mind. So, and who owns the publishing company? I'm like, I don't know. Have you confirmed that the publishing company is not owned by one of the 17 Russian oligarchs that are currently under sanctions by the State Department? I was like, no, it didn't really occur to me that in order to receive $500, I had to run their names against the terrorist watch list just in case. But now that I know that this is my patriotic duty, let us all check the database while singing USA, USA. And I'm sure we will find out. So I checked. The first name of the person who had sent me the money was Oleg. And they said, Oleg is a name that's listed on our list. I'm like, Oleg is like the fourth most common name in Russia. That's like me receiving money from someone in South America called Pablo.  I know, I've seen the Netflix show. I know you have a Pablo on your list, but this is the different Pablo. Pablo's a common name.  And I'm thinking, I've read this in a book. I've read this in a book. And I'm trying to remember who it was. Is this is this from George Orwell's 1984? Or is this from Kafka, the trial? Because this is crazy. This whole conversation is crazy. So long story short. Well, okay, long story long, because it's funny, seven months. It took me seven months to receive $500 from the highly suspicious Oleg for my book. Needless to say, the next time I did the deal with a publisher, I said, you're paying me in Bitcoin. Are we clear? Okay, what does neutral mean? Neutral means that it's my money.  It's my money. I can't say that. If I say that, they close all my bank accounts, and then I get a knock on the door, and then I have to go and explain to new people who Oleg is, and these people are less friendly because they're from the FBI. So anyway, neutral means that a system of money should not care who the sender or the recipient is, should not care what the purpose is, should only care about getting the transaction through. It's communication. It's communication about value. Now, this seems like a very radical idea, radical as in politically unfavorable, radical as in dangerous. What if people could give other people money without anybody knowing about it? I mean, that sounds like a pretty dangerous idea. Oh, no, wait. Actually, that's how the world worked for thousands of years. In fact, until the 1990s, that's how the world worked, right? People could give other people money. People can still give other people money. It's called cash, but even internationally, people could give other people money without anybody knowing what purpose it was for. What happened that was so bad that now we need to check everything? Because I'm pretty sure Oleg isn't the main source of funding for terrorism. At least I hope not, because I'd get in trouble. Censorship-resistant means that if somebody wants me to stop sending money, to stop giving money to someone, they can't. And the reason they can't stop me is because this is a system of speech, because money is communication, and because whether others believe that I have a human right to speak, a human right to associate, a human right to express myself, a human right to support the political causes, associations, or organizations that I choose to, is their problem. Because I have those human rights. I didn't ask for them. They weren't given to me or granted. I have them. There's a hint in the actual sentence. Human right starts with the most important qualifying word, which is how I got them, by being human. That's it. That's the requirement. All right. Any other humans here? You all have them. Great. Congratulations. So the idea here is that money as a system of communication is, like any system of communication, part of human rights. Now, there's a lot of governments who disagree with that idea. Right? There's a lot of governments who used to disagree with the idea of separating church and state. There's a lot of governments who used to disagree with the idea of people voting, especially women. They disagreed with that idea, too. There's a lot of governments that disagreed with a lot of ideas that we've now changed, because we know better. So maybe, hopefully, in 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, we will come to an understanding that there's a reason why we separate church and state. And for exactly the same reason, we should probably separate money and state. Because if money has a purpose of commerce and you turn it into a system of policing or a system of military control or a system of war, one of the things that happens is, it stops working as money. And that's a problem. Because if you start destroying your economy in order to do law enforcement, or you start destroying your economy in order to do war, what will be destroying your economy? So there's that. But there's a bigger problem. The problem is that if you give other people control over where you can and cannot spend money, those other people may decide that you shouldn't be spending money financing their political opposition, the other party, or anything else that you might be funding. And pretty soon, that kind of power turns into corruption. Turns out, that's why we separated church and state in most civilized countries. Because they corrupt each other. And if you take the banks and the government, and you bring them a bit too close together, they start getting very corrupt, very, very corrupt, right?  So out of these crazy radical ideas, we call them the ideas of the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, human rights, ideas like this, came this crazy idea that we could do it with money. And we now have this system that is open, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant, and public. Public is the idea that everything you do is verifiable on the network by everybody else, which means no one can cheat, because you can run software that can tell you definitively if a transaction has happened or not. So with these principles, we've built a new system of money. Now the question is, what happens next? Who needs this? Who uses this? How will it develop? Will governments allow it to happen? Will governments try to stop it? And it happens anyway, because they can't stop it. We don't know the answers to those questions. What we do know is, for the first time in history, we now have these capabilities. And now we've taken them a bit further. It's not just money. With technologies like smart contracts that are in systems like Ethereum that I'm interested in and wrote a book about, these concepts now extend to more complicated, some would say more sophisticated, systems that allow you to do other things like, for example, build corporations, corporations that are not registered by the state, or domiciled in a specific location, but operate as independent entities on the blockchain.  Because anybody who hears that name goes, what? It doesn't really tell you what this thing is. It's kind of like a cross between an association like this meetup, a corporation like any company you know. I believe here you call them table. Is that what they're called? Table? Yes, I can't pronounce it. But I know what it is. So any range from your local neighborhood association all the way to the most powerful company slash family that exists in your country, you can express any of those things as a network-based entity that exists outside of borders. Again, what if we take a company and make that company open, borderless, public, neutral, censorship-resistant? Interesting things could happen. Interesting things are happening. And I want to focus a bit more on the idea of open. Most people misunderstand what that means. There's one layer of open. One layer of open is the idea that anyone can participate in any way they want simply by downloading the software. Okay, that's layer one. We understand what that means. But there's another more interesting thing that happens. You see, we're not operating these blockchain things in isolation. We're operating them in competition against existing financial services and systems. How many here use PayPal or Venmo? Okay, only one Venmo? Two. Kakao Pay. Very good. How many people here use? I can't use Kakao Pay. I tried to. It wants me to have a Korean phone number. So instead, I have to pay my taxis with a credit card. So anyway, Kakao Pay. How many people use Kakao Pay? Great. So those systems are not open. But they're not open for two reasons. One is they're not open in terms of I care have an account on Kakao Pay, because I don't have a Korean mobile phone number. So that's one example of not being open. In order to use the system, I have to be authorized with something. An ID card, phone number, something. I can't just download the software and operate on the network. But there's another much more interesting aspect of open. How many of you here write apps? Excellent. And how many of you here have written an app that runs on top of Kakao Pay? Oh, you can't. Why not? So you can't write an app that uses PayPal as a library, as a protocol, as a network, as a platform. You can connect to it so that it does the payments, but you can't extend it. You can't modify it. You can't build something different. And you certainly can't build something unauthorized, right? So I can't go out and build an application that does Kakao Pay, but for people who don't have Korean phone numbers. Why not? And that's where the second aspect of open really comes in. And you might think this is a small thing. Obviously, it's their network. Why would they allow me to go on to their network and start writing applications that change the purpose of the network? But now think about it a different way. That means that all of the new things have to come from them. If I come up with a great idea, I can't do it. If I want to do it, I have to build a complete payments network, just to run my idea on top of it. I can't just simply run it on top of theirs. Their system is closed in a very different way. It only allows innovation from the inside. And they think that's a good thing. And I think that's a great thing, because that's how we're going to win. Because you see, the really interesting thing about open blockchains is that any one of you can write an application on top of it. And not only can you write an application on top of it, you can write an application that changes the way the system works, that does something that nobody authorized. In fact, you can write something that does something very, very illegal, or very, very different, or very, very weird. And no one can stop you, because this is a type of radical openness, where it's not simply the fact that you have been allowed to access the platform, it is the opposite. You cannot be stopped from accessing the platform. It's not just open, it is unclosable. Does that make any sense? This is a really radical idea, and what it does is, it means you can write an application connected to this network, and make it do things nobody had considered before, and you don't need to have too many users. You only need to find one other person who wants to run that application, and between the two of you, you can run that application. So you have innovation for a market of one or two. And then you can do something even more radical. You can take your application and make it open. And now somebody who is building something else can build it on top of the blockchain, or on top of your application, or both, and then they can make their application open, and then somebody else comes along and makes their application open. And now everybody is building on top of everybody else's idea, without asking for anyone's permission. And what happens then is really astonishing, because we've seen it once before. This is the internet. This is what happened with the internet. What happened with the internet wasn't that we had some great companies that made some great platforms. What happened with the internet was that you didn't need anybody's permission to launch an application. And so you could launch one, and then let other people use it to launch another, and another, and another. And it created this tsunami of innovation that completely overwhelmed all of the possible competitors, so they couldn't compete, and this is going to happen to banking. They cannot compete against that, because there's no way you can do inside a company the amount of innovation of the entire world put together, all operating to serve their own special purpose without asking for anybody's permission. This is a really important point, and it's the reason why people don't understand at first the difference between PayPal, Venmo, Kakao Pay, and Bitcoin. They're like, so it's an app on your phone, and you can read a QR code and make a payment. So what? I've been able to do that with PayPal since 1995. So what? And that's where they're missing the point. It's not an app. It's a platform. It's an open platform, a radically open, borderless, public, neutral, censorship-persistent platform. Thank you.


What's up everybody? Jayce over at jayspeakscasebrakes.com, Blasters, here of 2020 Penini Select, Baseball One Box Break Two Random Teams, number four, and again to win spots and diamond icons, random hits. So at the end of the break, or sorry, first off, we're going to randomize customer names, you get double the spots, one spot gets two random teams, just show you the hits out of this box, this blaster, then at the end of the break we'll randomize customer names, the original 15, we'll get your names in here, and customers at one and two, top two I believe, get spots in the random hit of diamond icons, which will be coming up next after this. So here we go, there's the cutoff, Daniel got last spot module, so we'll do that at the end of the break, first let's do the break itself, so we double up your names, good luck, roll it, 235 times, I know it is like Vegas right now, it's actually the same, it's like Arizona, where you're at right now man, five, two and a three, five times, one, two, three, four, two, five times, one, down to Daniel, and then my sister on Friday had back surgery, so she's at my parents' house, went to go see her as well, Rocky's down to the Dodgers, all the Rockies, Brandon with the meds, Michael with the Marlins after the brace, Mark with the Pirates Brewers, Mary Lou with the White Sox, Jacob with the Giants, Mary Lou with the Astros, Michael with the Royals, Daniel with the Rays, Matthew the Nationals, Brandon with the Oros, Juan with the Twins, Brandon with the A's, Jared with the Indians, Michael with the Angels, Jacob with the Yankees, Jared with the, or Jared with the Phillies, Jared, Spielman with the Diamondbacks as well as the Cardinals, Matthew going to the Padres, Michael with the Texas Rangers, Jacob with the Reds, Anthony with the Cubs, Jared with the Mariners Brandon, with the Tigers, Jared with the Blue Jays, Jacob with the Red Sox and Daniel with the Dodgers, so again we're going to close the trade window, open up the blaster and then see who gets spots in the Diamondbacks.  But thankfully she only had a couple broken ribs and obviously her back kind of got messed up, so she finally had the surgery because it was supposed to have it earlier this year but with COVID hit they kind of were just like, well it's not life threatening obviously, so we kind of have to push it back but she finally had a schedule yesterday or Friday sorry, so on Thursday night I had to leave early around 9.30, like 30, 40 minutes before I ended to go take her to my parents' house so they could drive in the morning to the hospital. But yeah, it was crazy. No, actually what was kind of interesting was that, you know, we wanted her to obviously be taken care of at the hospital and I think you're safer at the hospital, what was funny is that it's funny but not funny but you know my mom was just like telling her like, hey, you know what, you should ask the doctor, obviously you're not feeling good, so instead of staying only one night, try to stay two nights, you know, just so that way, you know, safer for you there. But then, you know, the doctor told her like, well actually, we kind of advise you to go home because obviously in other floors and other parts of the hospital there is COVID patients and, you know, obviously, not saying you could get it but there's more likely of it happening because there is some in the building and, you know, some, not nurses I guess are helping them but the people that deliver the food. So, you know, she's like, actually I told her for a while but I actually should go home. I guess she wouldn't be here no more. She goes, yeah, so just obviously like, we want you to stay here unless you can't, you know, we want to just stay here as long as possible to be safe at the same time that they can save a few people at home. So, my parents picked her up and took her to their house and she's over there in my parents' house now. But no, she was fine. She only stayed in the hospital for a day when the accident first happened but she just had to get the surgery done for her back. Yeah, so that's what we were just like, no, it's safer to be at the hospital when we're like, no, it's actually not safer to be at the hospital, you know, it's actually better to be home. So, she ended up going back home after a day, which was cool. But she's good though. I guess it was successful surgery. So, I guess we just have to see if the pain continues in her back. That was supposed to kind of help it out I guess. Yeah, so I think the time we went to Sharky, I think both of my sister was there. Because it was just me and my wife and then my mom had came for the grand opening. She just loves to be around here. She's probably actually watching right now knowing her. But yeah, I think both of my sisters came for the grand opening. We went to Sharky that I think my older brother was there too. And then my brother took my mom home and we stayed for a little bit. Alright, guys, so good luck. Let's roll the dice. And Matthew down to Daniel, top two names get a spot each in diamond icons. After five and a six 11 times. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and 11. Boom, 11 times that I wrote an 11 I did right that I wrote 12 or a 10 for some reason. Five and a six 11 times, Michael and Daniel congratulations. Last bar module squeaks in and gets into the diamond icons around and hit number 18 and coming up next guys is diamond icons. Appreciate it.


day, Sean Casey. Sean is the Pacific Health Costa Coordinator for the World Health Organization. And Sean has been a leader in some of the most challenging global health emergency events in the last decade, I would say. To name a few, I know you were heavily involved in the West Africa Ebola outbreak. In 2014, the Nepal earthquake in 2015, the Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, Haiti 2016, the measles outbreak in 2019. And you have what I consider quite the distinction of being named humanitarian hero of the year in 2015. So welcome, and thank you for joining us today. Thanks so much, Nadine. Thanks for having me and greetings from French Polynesia. Yes, that's wonderful. I'm particularly excited that you can set this up from a distance. And you said you were sitting right outside the emergency room. I'm sitting at the Emergency Operations Center here in Tahiti, where the government of French Polynesia has commandeered two buildings next to the Ministry of Health to bring together all of the repurposed staff from across the government who are supporting or coordinating the COVID-19 response. Amazing, amazing. Hey, as we talk about, go through this little 30-minute slot or interview that we have. I thought we would start very general and broad and then get down to what I think is going to be the most interesting things to ask you. But just starting very basic, I think the average person is very familiar with terms like the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, the WHO, the World Health Organization. But they may not actually be very comfortable of what role the WHO plays in global health crises, pandemics such as COVID-19.  Sure, well, the World Health Organization obviously works globally. We have six regional offices and a global headquarters in Geneva. So I work in the Western Pacific region, which is headquartered in Manila in the Philippines. And I work in a division that's called the Division of Pacific Technical Support, which is based in Fiji and supports the 21 countries and territories of the Pacific, the small island developing states across the Pacific Ocean. The World Health Organization has a few roles in pandemic preparedness and response. We have a historical, traditional role of technical advice and serving as the kind of global organization of reference for technical guidance, situational analysis, risk assessment. So we have responsibility basically with where we've been made responsible by member states. We're a member state agency. So all of the member states of the world have charged us with understanding what's happening in the world of infectious disease, noncommunicable disease, environmental health, and other areas, giving evidence-based advice and providing the best available information that we're able to provide for any given situation. In recent years, we've also become much more operational. So in a number of responses around the world now, you'll see WHO directly supporting field hospitals, deploying supplies, deploying staff. For example, I've been deployed to French Polynesia to provide technical advice and operational coordination support. And we also serve a coordination function. So my title is Health Cluster Coordinator, and that's basically WHO is the cluster-lead agency for health in any emergency. So we're responsible not just for supporting ministries of health, but also for helping to coordinate any partners, any agencies, any NGOs, organizations, emergency medical teams that may deploy to basically ensure that we're addressing all of the needs and also not duplicating efforts. Tell me a little bit more as you narrow in what your role in the Pacific is about, and what specifically, either as the World Health Organization or you as the Pacific Health Cluster Coordinator, what is your focus? So for COVID-19 in particular, we've been working on preparedness and response since really early January. The Pacific, like I said, has 21 countries and territories. Most of which are quite small. And many of the countries that we support have many islands, which are difficult to reach. There are enormous logistical challenges. So I'm in French Polynesia today. There's over 100 islands here. And some of them can be reached by air. Some of them can only be reached really by sea. That's the case for a number of the countries around the Pacific. We have limited flight connections. Some of the countries are very, very small. So we work with Fiji, which has close to a million people, on the larger side. And countries like Tuvalu, which has just over 10,000. So in those very small countries, there are all kinds of human resource constraints, financial resource constraints. And so we have been working since January to help all of the Pacific countries and territories to prepare as best as possible to prevent the importation of COVID-19, to detect it if it arrives as quickly as possible, to isolate and manage those cases, and to reduce morbidity and mortality as much as possible. The good news is that, to date, only a small number of Pacific countries and territories actually have confirmed cases. So in the North Pacific, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam, which are US territories. In the South Pacific, we have New Caledonia, Fiji, and French Polynesia that all have cases. The numbers are much lower than most other parts of the world. So Fiji has 17 cases. As of today, French Polynesia, where I am, has 55 over a one month or so period. And most of the other countries don't have cases, which is good news. But at the same time, we still have to continue to prepare. Because for now, flights have been stopped. Travel has stopped. We don't know how long that can be sustained. A number of Pacific Island countries rely very heavily on imported goods and flight connections to the rest of the world just for their basic supply chain. So we'll continue to prepare, reinforcing surveillance, reinforcing case management. Some Pacific countries have only one or two ICU beds that normally function and very limited hospital space. So we're working on all of these fronts. And we have staff deployed over the last few months to a number of countries providing training on infection prevention and control. We've dispatched personal protective equipment to almost every Pacific country. And we're now working on trying to get testing capability to all of the Pacific countries and territories. Right now only a small number can actually perform tests locally, which for sure will hinder their ability to detect and manage cases quickly. So it's across the whole spectrum. And at the same time that we're focusing on COVID, we're trying not to forget all of the other health needs that don't go away. So the Pacific has a huge challenge with non-communicable disease. Women still have babies to deliver, kids still get sick. The regular drug supply has to still be there. And the supply chains are interrupted. So at the same time, we're trying to keep an eye on the rest of the health system and make sure that ministries of health are able to meet all of the needs of the population to be as healthy as possible.  The first is when we think of, in particular, COVID-19, we think of China when it became just a little seedling of a concern, and then when it became a larger issue. What triggered your team to be deployed in the Pacific specifically for COVID-19? How large is your team? And how does the World Health Organization either decide or layer what it does up against the departments of health or the ministries of health depending on what it's called in the individual country? How do you balance that and how do you craft yourself specifically for that country or for that area? So that's about it for your questions. A few questions. Our team actually, not because we had a crystal ball, but because we had a measles outbreak in the Pacific last year, our team was already in existence before our emergency response team, our incident management team was already functioning and deploying around the Pacific before COVID even was identified. So we actually had an incident management team that we pivoted that included repurposed staff from across a number of departments in our offices, but also additional consultants that were brought on board. So we were already working on measles in Samoa where you and I met on measles preparedness in a number of other countries. So in January, I was deployed to the Federated States of Micronesia. We had staff deployed to the Northern Mariana Islands. And at a certain stage in January, we started kind of switching from the focus, or not switching completely, but including COVID-19 in those discussions. And from, I would say, late January, we really started doing dedicated COVID deployments around the Pacific. And we deployed staff, I think, to almost every country and territory at some stage between late January and late March, providing training, providing planning support, and just advising. So I'm probably gonna forget some of the questions that you asked, but I think we take some of our cues from, we take, you know, we respond to requests. So we have an ongoing discussion, an ongoing dialogue with all of the Pacific ministries of health and with the ministries of health across the region. Actually, there's a meeting right now that's happening every week with the regional director of WHO, all of our Pacific offices and the Pacific ministries of health with the ministers and then the directors of health. So we have an ongoing dialogue about the situation in which the ministries and departments of health can ask questions and express some of their needs. We also have, you know, lots of bilateral discussions. At the same time, in the COVID context, we've done some pushing of advice and materials just because not everybody may be fully conscious of what they need. I mean, I think this is a new virus and I think all of us are still not exactly sure what we need to be able to respond effectively. It's a learning process day by day. It's beyond the usual capacity of most of these innate teams or departments of health to be managing a pandemic, would you say? I don't think there's a country in the world that was completely prepared to deal with this. And I think every country and every health department and ministry of health has had to reallocate resources and repurpose staff and rethink everything that they had thought about before. You know, we've all been working on pandemic preparedness for a very long time. We've been dealing with pandemics for centuries and in the Pacific, there's an acute awareness of the Spanish flu pandemic from 1918 where some countries were very badly affected and other countries weren't affected at all because of border control measures and other measures that they put into place. So pandemics are on our mind in the Pacific and we also know that the Pacific countries are particularly vulnerable. They're protected in a way by their isolation but they're particularly vulnerable. So there was no illusion that any country in the Pacific is ready to deal with the pandemic but we had done pandemic planning and almost every country has a pandemic influenza plan but this pandemic is not pandemic influenza, this is pandemic coronavirus which doesn't have a vaccine as influenza does or influenza vaccines are generally easier to develop. It doesn't have any therapeutics that are readily available and we don't have a prior knowledge of the dynamics of transmission and clinical evolution. So we can use some of that content that was developed and some of those plans that were developed as a baseline and thinking about how you manage the incident, how you reorganize resources, emergency declarations if necessary but some of the very technical content we've had to really develop as we go along. So since January, WHO has been releasing technical guidance and updating it constantly which is a massive undertaking to develop and it's also a massive undertaking to digest. And so when I mentioned before that the Pacific countries have limited human resources it's particularly important that we as WHO in the Pacific can help to process some of that content and translate it for the local context and also filter what's really needed at what time and what can maybe be used later or what can be used differently. You know, you maybe think of something in the context of Hawaii, because people in Hawaii view themselves culturally and very much part of the Pacific basin and at first when you were discussing this I thought, yes, this is in the context of Hawaii but is that true? Does your team view Hawaii as part of the United States and are the strategy or the relationship that the World Health Organization has with us is from the lens of the United States under the CDC or are we part of that strategy for the Pacific region as a whole? So the United States is a member state of WHO in the Western Pacific region because we have three US flag territories in the region. So our Pacific office doesn't directly cover Hawaii from a technical support perspective but we do support American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Having said that, you know, we met through a collaboration with Hawaii and supported the Pacific and I think it's an area where we'd like to see more development. I think that Hawaii is inextricably linked to the rest of the Pacific through flights, through culture, through language and through history and there's incredible resources that are available there which we saw deployed for the Samoa measles response in November and December of last year. At the same time, I think our focus on technical support is really across the breadth of the Pacific but there are always some countries that might require more support than others and Hawaii has an incredible level of resources particularly compared to most of the rest of the Pacific. So we're always happy to engage with Hawaii but it's not a territory that's, you know, a state that's in our typical remit as the Western Pacific region. No, I know exactly what you're referring to. We've had discussions on this as a result that Hawaii Health Corps was created and a lot of thoughts of what we could do both locally as well as with our island neighbors and I don't mean our island neighbors within the state but in the larger Pacific basin and some of those conversations have come to a halt as we're all trying to deal with our regional COVID-19 but I know these conversations will continue because the excitement that was generated just in the healthcare community was palpable to say the least. You know, there's an incredible level of Pacific solidarity. I mean, like I said, there's 21 countries and territories and they're all different and they have their own languages and their own culture but there's an incredible level of solidarity in the Pacific and we saw in the measles response last year, smaller countries, countries that did not have formed emergency medical teams, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, with varying levels of resources, financial and human, still sent support to Samoa which is one of the larger Pacific countries to help them with their measles outbreak and we've seen that same kind of action in past emergencies and I'm sure we'll see it in the future. I couldn't agree with you more. And you can see that in healthcare, you can see that in the Polynesian Voyaging Society in their history and of itself. I couldn't agree with you more. You know, Sean, talk a little bit about some of the challenges that who has been struggling with in, let's just use COVID-19 because that's where we are now. It is such an incredible example whether it's been, whether it's general structure is, was ready to handle this. Is it been a learning process? Are you stretching yourself in ways that you've not had before? Either in professional resources, having the language or the defined type of teams that were necessary to do this. It's a very open question and to just understand what does it feel like going through this process live? Right. Well, I think, like I said before, I don't think anybody was completely prepared for COVID-19 but I think for WHO, we learn in every response. So we have a systematic after action review process that we apply and we take very seriously. So we learned a massive amount through the Ebola response in West Africa where I spent a year and a half. We learned a huge amount through the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is ongoing and through past pandemic experiences, through the SARS response, the H1N1 response. And so nobody's perfect, no organization is perfect. We have our strengths and our weaknesses but I think the systems that we have developed through those responses were well adapted to COVID. So the principles, the underlying principles are there and that's why it was in the Pacific so great that we already had an incident management team established. There was basically no blip whatsoever. We immediately pivoted that team to work on and aside from having some people who were tired from several months of pretty intense work on measles pivoting to the next response. I think the model is really a good one and it allows us to act relatively quickly to process information pretty quickly, to deploy support quite quickly. A lot of the challenges that we're facing at the moment are logistical challenges that are really outside of our control. So even if we have staff who are ready to deploy, even if we have PPE that can in theory be shipped, we don't have a way to move a lot of these supplies. So we're having to get creative and that's why this week or next week, French Polynesia is going to be sending a plane to China and they're sending the plane to Paris and we're coming up here with creative solutions and I think everybody in the world is doing that including WHO at the moment. But I think the fundamental systems have developed over time and will continue to develop, they'll continue to improve. But yeah, I think the systems that we've evolved over time are all being used and they're being used the way that they were intended to. No, by all means, that's an excellent answer and this was not in any way to place any, other than an intellectual conversation of what do you think and what do we live as we fly the plane that we're building in the future? I don't think any of us could have expected that global air travel would have come to a grinding halt. So I think that's something that raises lots of questions about staff deployments and production of materials and stockpiles and things like that. I think what's really encouraging in this response is seeing the level of investment and financial investment and human investment and political investment in finding out as much as we can, sharing information as quickly as possible and acting upon it. So there's never been a level of investment in effort in vaccine research, therapeutics research, diagnostics research in such a collaborative way. We see papers coming out every day, just required information sharing, which is completely overwhelming, but also really useful. And I think it's enabled us to learn at a click that we would not have seen before in previous pandemics. And in such a collaborative way, the speed in which we are using international papers, research, opinion pieces, and trying to incorporate them on the clinical level into our procedures, protocols, and guidelines. I've never experienced anything like this before. Absolutely. You know, I've got two really quick questions for you. One along the lines, and let me be very oversimplistic. You know, when you think of COVID-19, there, we don't have the typical tools in which we often address other illnesses. We often use the flu or the measles as an example of having a preventative tool or arm, which would be the vaccine. We have medications to deal with someone getting it, such as the Tami Flu or antiviral medication and other ways in which we can do point of care testing to be able to quickly tell what is going on in our immediate population and in a reporting system. Tell me a little bit about what you think, and I'm gleaning not necessarily the official World Health Organization opinion. I am asking you. We will not have a vaccine likely for at least another year, two year and a half for very safe and logistic reasons. We are not likely to have an antiviral ready. You've heard everyone from politicians to singular papers discussing whether certain drug combinations or drugs that are used in other purposes might be of some help. So there's a lot of focus on having point of care testing. And what I mean is testing that can be, we can get results in a very short period of time anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes and that it's cheap enough and easy enough to be in any office clinic or emergency room. Any thoughts about that in the role that the World Health Organization might play with the various countries and giving any guidelines? And I know that there's no official response yet. Right, so I mean, I think fundamentally we're going to need some combination of diagnostic capacity, clinical capacity, therapeutics or otherwise. We're going to need to continue to apply non-pharmaceutical measures. And I don't think anybody has figured out what the right dose of non-pharmaceutical measures is. And when I say non-pharmaceutical measures, I mean social distancing, physical distancing, lockdown, travel restrictions and things like that, which are obviously showing an impact, but we don't know yet when they can be led up and not, and all of those pieces fit together.  We'll absolutely, hopefully, we are very, very hopeful that we'll have a vaccine at some stage, but until then, testing and social distancing, there's some kind of non-pharmaceutical measures are going to be the prescribed approach. So yeah, I mean, for WHO, we're investing a lot in all of these areas and trying to figure out what the best solutions are and also recognizing the different countries and have different contexts and different needs. So large scale testing is definitely needed in populations that have large scale transmission and where we really don't know who's infected and who's not and there's likely to be more social interaction. In some countries like here in French Polynesia, we're not testing everybody because we know that half of the cases that we've identified so far are imported. So here, we wanna have very focused testing and reasonable application of social distancing measures maybe with an eye at some point for too long to not having local transmission. So some countries that still don't have cases, most of them are in the Pacific and that's where the non-pharmaceutical interventions are absolutely key. There's other countries that have very large scale transmission and their diagnostics, whether it's point of care or some kind of rapid diagnostics are gonna be really critical for them to be able to reopen, but diagnostics are not on their own solution. A vaccine at some stage might be a very, very helpful solution, but it's gonna take time. So in the meantime, it's gonna be diagnostics, it's gonna be continued focus on finding therapeutics that work. WHO is supporting a trial now that has 90 countries signed up or interested in 900 patients enrolled looking at four different drugs or combinations of drugs. We're gonna have to keep doing more of that. We have to go full speed on all of these efforts. There's not gonna be one vaccine. Thank you. Exactly. Do you know, as you're describing all of these things, it occurs to me that one of the big questions that is going to be on every politician's mind as well as government is how do we go from the social distancing many people have to stay in place where we are now to returning back to whatever degree of normal or new normal. And it seems to me by the way you were describing the World Health Organization's role in other pandemics or that this would be a very new role to be involved in turning the faucet back on and giving guidelines along those rules or such. Comment about that because it's very political space right now but I think you and I can also agree it's also very clinic science space. You're in the box. Sure. Well, there's the health side of it which is for us as health authorities we can say the ideal solution is that for now everybody stays at home or washes their hands or wears a mask or whatever the specific advice is that comes from the health authorities but we have to take into consideration the fact that schools are closed that parents can't work because their kids aren't at school that in the US today they just announced that I think in four weeks 22 million people have lost their jobs the economic impact is going to be absolutely massive so we have to strike that balance but we can't strike it alone as health professionals because there are other dynamics at play and what will really influence the direction that COVID-19 takes us is human decisions many many different human decisions that are going to be made some of what's your health decisions and some of what's your social and economic and political so I think the really important thing as we go forward is having that dialogue and continuing the dialogue and continuing the debate and there's no right answer but we want to protect as many lives as possible whether that means reopening or keeping things closed for a while or gradual reopening there's no formula yet so countries that are inching out at the moment are doing it in a kind of a trial fashion to try to find the channel that will work best for them and then all of the rest of us are going to have to keep watching and learning almost everything that's been done in the Pacific to keep population safe has been referencing what happened in China and what happened in Singapore and what happened in Korea and what happened in Italy and that's influence decisions and I think we're going to have to keep doing that so as health authorities we need to keep looking at what everybody else is doing and learning from it use the best available evidence and science but also take into consideration that we can't keep everybody locked down forever so we're going to need to find additional solutions and those solutions are likely to include diagnostics like you said at some stage maybe therapeutics lots of non-pharmaceutical interventions of different kinds continuing to reinforce good hygiene practices and physical distancing measures maybe that are not social distancing but physical distancing measures so we can still interact as a society and hopefully someday vaccines it's going to be a combination of those from a response perspective but also from a planning perspective oh man that is perfect and it's exactly what I think we want to know and want to hear that the World Health Organization is up to I know we're in trying times as the US has put a halt to some of the funding that goes to the World Health Organization but it might be too presumptuous in saying it's very likely that the World Health Organization is going to continue to do what it does regardless of what is going on politically we're laser focused we're laser focused on our mission before coming on with you I was on a call with the entire staff of the Western Pacific region there were 375 people in the call and the the central message from our regional director from across the staff as we have a mission and I think now is the moment for focus and solidarity we've we continue to receive very positive feedback from member states and partners of course like I said no response is perfect and we're all learning it's a novel disease but we're focused right now on trying to prevent as many infections as possible trying to make sure that as few people as possible get infected and get ill and die from COVID-19 and from everything else so WHO's mission remains the same it's not just COVID-19 it's about advancing the health and well-being of society and we're going to keep on trying to do that and of course the decisions on funding may have an impact on us and we'll work through that and hopefully those resources can be made up in other ways through additional contributions or through working more efficiently which we all wanted to do but we're not going to let up on the work that we're doing it's absolutely continuing I can tell you I am in awe of what the WHO does of the mission believe in it I tell you our small interaction if I could speak for Hawaii was nothing but positive on our brother country brother sister country or Polynesian country and thank you thank you for everything you do thank you for being our guest today and taking time out from Papa Ete thanks so much I hear you're going to be off soon to your next assignment is what you were saying also well no I don't know I came here one month ago today for five days and there are no flights out at the moment so there's a flight to Paris every 10 days Fiji is kind of in the other direction that's where I'm normally based so we'll see where I end up and when but I've managed to buy some shirts in the supermarket and I'm still finding baguettes and french cheese here so I'll survive in the meantime and we'll keep focusing on the work okay that's okay it was so great thank you so much