#1456 - Michael Shermer

I'm fine, thank you. I'm still breathing.

It's good to see you again. We were just saying before we got started that the last time we saw each other was we went to dinner about six weeks ago. And you're thinking that that might be the end of that kind of stuff.

That was my last time I've been in a restaurant, actually. Well, I think restaurants, of course, will reopen, but I think the kind of social distancing we're seeing now, it's not going to go all the way back to the way it used to be. I think we may quit shaking hands and hugging to the extent that we used to, although I don't think we'll ever go all the way to the, say, the japanese model of social distancing. But I think there'll be modifications like that. The other thing I've been thinking about is the change of remote, say, meetings and education. I mean, I'm in the studio here in Santa Barbara where I've been recording lectures for my Chapman university class, skepticism 101. And I just upload them and share them with the students. And then they watch them, and then I send them a quiz. They take the quiz, they send them back. Now, that's not a complete replacement of a brick and mortar building with a small class seminar discussion, say, but it does adequately replace a lot of traditional education that you don't really need to be in a classroom for.

Do you think that this is preparing us for the ultimate, where we embrace the symbiotic relationship that we have with computers and become one with the machine? I mean, it seems like we're becoming. Yeah, we're becoming closer and closer to some sort of an electronic community. It's weird.

Yeah, I think it was happening slowly already, and this is kind of a jump starting it. I mean, already tech companies like Zoom are having to ramp up their game because the systems are crashing, because pretty much everybody's doing Zoom meetings now. And then they have to adjust to Zoom bombing because, of course, there's people like that out there. They just want to screw with you. And then I was also thinking about things like theaters. Why do we need to go to theaters anymore? I mean, I love watching a movie on a big screen, but the screens we have at home now, big television screens, super high, know, why not just watch movies at home?

Well, I don't think we're going to have much of a choice. I was reading an article this morning about AMC theaters. They might have to go under because of this.

Really?

Yeah, it's not good. I mean, you got to think these companies are accustomed to having a certain amount of money coming in every month and they never, no one anticipated anything like this, where all businesses are just going to shut down gyms. I mean, how many gyms are going to go under? How many yoga studios? It's a strange and trying time for people who have small businesses, for sure.

Yeah. One of my cycling budies owns the Laconiata theater complex and, of course, rents out the space to different retailers, including the theater managers. And anyway, he was telling me that they normally pay $93,000 a month in rent, but they bring in like seven and a half million dollars a year or something, so it all balances out. But they just told him, we're not going to make our rent this month. So he has to go to his mortgage company, the bank where he pays off his mortgage and say, I can't pay you this month because these guys can't pay me. Okay, so multiply that by 10 million or 100 million or something. And that's kind of what we've been going through.

Yeah. And I don't really understand the economics of this stimulus package, of how they're going to be able to distribute it and sort of balance people out. It seems like it's just a small band aid on a very large wound.

Yeah. Well, of course the government can't just print money indefinitely. Then we're going to get huge inflation and then that could be catastrophic. So this conversation that people have been wanting to have, but they get hammered every time they bring it up. I think at some point we're going to have to have in the next few weeks is the economic trade off and costs to people's lives compared to what we're doing with social isolation to save people's lives. And at the moment, we're in the mode of there's no dollar amount you can put on a human life, therefore, total social isolation, no matter what it does to the economy, is what we're going to do now. But at some point there's an economic calculation like how many people are going to die, say, in the next year if we never open the economy? Of course we will, but at what point do you do that? The supply chain dries up. You can't get not just toilet paper, but food supplies start to dry up, and then you get social unrest and there's risks there, too. And the idea of putting a dollar figure on a human life is repulsive to most of us, I think, intuitively in this context. But in fact, we do it all the time in terms of, like, an automobile company has to pay off the family of somebody who died in their car. Well, there are people who do those calculations. Like, what's the value of a human life? Well, the high end figure is about $10 million. After 911, the families got paid off. I think it was $250,000 a person times the 3000 something. So it sounds so cold. Like, who does those calculations? Well, statisticians do that sort of thing, and attorneys and accountants work on that, and judges and juries have to face it. And that's kind of a normal part of other aspects of life that we're not used to thinking about. Most of us don't think about it, but at some point, that's the kind of calculation we're going to have to do for what we're in now.

Do you think that there is another way to do this? There's been some talk of isolating the people that are high risk, isolating the people with underlying conditions, people that are elderly, things of that nature. Do you think that that's a way that they can move forward?

Yeah, for sure. But again, people, we have this egalitarian molecule that doesn't sound right. Sounds like a death panel. Some group of government agents are going to tell us who's going to live and who's going to die. And that feels like we're sliding into conspiracy mongering. But in fact, that is what you have to do is a kind of a triage. And South Korea has been pretty good about this testing. Everybody, they jumped on it right away. They did that track and trace. They got it right down to, I think it was the 31st patient they found who had gone to two church services, and then she was in a car accident and taken to the hospital. And that's when it spread from there. That one day, I think it was in late February when that happened, and they just jumped all over it. Total deaths in South Korea. I think it was like just a couple hundred compared to most other countries. So there's a way to. It is, and they've been super careful about isolating people and targeting the people that most need the tests and so on. And that's just the kind of thing I think we have to do.

What do you think about what's going on in Germany? Because Germany is very, I mean, so many of these european countries, particularly Italy, are experiencing this very high death. Germany, I mean, they must have exemplary health care, they must be doing something right or be robust and healthy individuals. Is it a genetic thing, you think? Is it a healthcare thing? Because they have a very low death rate?

I think they have a high, tight culture. A very tight culture. That is, when my wife's from Cologne, Germany. So I know this from personal experience. But also there's studies. Michelle Gelfin does these studies on loose and tight cultures, and that Germany is a very tight culture, that is to say, very law and order, law abiding. And when the german government says, all right, this is what we're going to do, people do it. And Americans are not that we're a much looser culture, more freedom oriented. And if the government says, you can't go to the beach, like, well, the hell with it, I'm going to the beach anyway. Germans don't do that. And they do have a really good health care system, and they jump right on it. And I think that's one explanation we've seen yesterday, this rise in deaths of African Americans versus white Americans and having to do with income. But of course, money is just a proxy for something else, which has to do with the quality of the health care they get, the food that they eat, how healthy and exercise prone they are or not, diabetes, obesity, these sorts of things down the line when you're attacked by a virus like that can have an effect on your immune system and therefore the response to the disease. So I think those are the kinds of cohorts we're going to have to target to save lives. And I think countries like South Korea and Germany have been doing that pretty well without pushback.

Yeah, I'm hoping. My best hope out of this is that it's a wake up call for people that don't take care of their bodies. The people that get through this, like you, dodge the bullet. Now let's clean that diet up. Let's get you moving. Let's start some exercise on a regular, weekly basis. Get some nutrients into your system, eliminate all this sugar and bullshit that people eat and take care of your body, take care of your immune system. Let's pump everything back up to sustainable levels. That very well could be the difference between people who contract this virus and survive versus people who contract this virus and don't.

Absolutely. I mean, how could it not hurt to be healthy, fit and have a good immune system, even if for some reason we can't find the exact connection to this particular virus? Just as a global thing, even if you do all that and it turns out there's no connection to this particular virus. This is still a good thing to do.

Yeah. You've been cycling, right? I know you're a cycler. And so you were actually riding your bike today, right?

Yeah, this morning, actually. This is really funny. This is kind of the world we live. There's no more group rides, of course, and all the big tours, like the Tour de France have been canceled. So there I'm riding along this morning, and I see up ahead of me, TJ Vanguard, who's the top american pro right now, and apparently he lives over in the kind of Santa Yanez Valley area.