 It's gonna have on places that, you know, they're either just starting or, you know, they're kind of making, you know, going week to week. Brendan, you're over in England and you've been writing quite a bit about the impacts over there. Can you tell us about what you're seeing? I now think that our response to the virus is going to be worse than the virus itself in terms not simply of the economic impact but what an economic impact really means which is how it hits people's lives, how it impacts on people's health for itself. So here in the UK, particularly in London, I cycle around London a lot. This is one of the largest, busiest, most economically important streets. Every window of the city has just been put to sleep overnight. It's absolutely terrifying to see. And what we've witnessed in the UK, and I know this has happened around the world, is the largest, most severe demobilization of the working classes in human history. We've never seen anything like this. The economic consequences of that are going to be dire. The Financial Times this week predicted that this will be the largest economic contraction in the UK since around 1900, second, in fact, to the Great Depression. So we are storing up huge problems with this kind of blanket approach to COVID-19, which says that the only way we can survive I think we're making a grave error that people will be paying for for a very long time. Matthew, what are you thinking? I'm not, I'm really not. This sounds flippant, but I'm kind of committed to stupidity through this whole thing. And I think that's one of the better approaches for me personally. Yeah, I'm trying to handle the things that I need to handle and not really think about anything a whole lot bigger than me. And when I think about the economy at a local, regional, national, international level, it really comes down to my life. The only economy really is mine. But I do have to consider a bunch of other things. So for example, you guys all know Mo, Moora, my girlfriend, she has a profession in makeup and hospitality that is just obliterated. And lives in Las Vegas most of the time. Right, right. So you can imagine how the rug got yanked out from under her and a lot of the people she knows, performers at different places on the strip. It doesn't matter who you are, if you depend on this tourism and hospitality, you've been eviscerated, right? And so even if things are fine for me, everybody you know is affected in one way or another. Things are a little bit different. Where I live in New York, it's pretty remote in rural. And so a lot of the changes coming down the pike here and a lot of the difficulties that I read about even in New York City just haven't hit me, you know? And I'm somebody who grocery shops like once a month. So it's not like my routine has changed a whole lot. So I'm really just trying to roll with everything. And at this point, support the people I know a lot more than thinking about it myself. Because they need it, I really don't. My wife and I, you know, Matt knows this. I don't think Louis or Brandon knows. My wife and I are actually supposed to be in Las Vegas right now. This week, starting yesterday for a concert was gonna be a reunion concert. One of my friends bands, I hadn't played together in about 10 years. They were playing at a rockabilly festival in Las Vegas. And I was really, really excited to go. He was really excited. He is a New York City based professional drummer plays at Birdland every Monday night or did until all of this happened. I mean, he'd started texting me really early on and all of this before we found out that the Vegas stuff was canceled. That basically every one of his gigs for the next, you know, for the next four months or so had just dropped off entirely. And I've, you know, I have, I started my career working in the music industry in Los Angeles tonight and New York City where I went to grad school. And I mean, I can't even tell you the number of friends I have who are literally out of work and have just no idea when another paycheck is coming in. Like absolutely no clue because their work is entertainment, service, any kind of thing where it requires interacting with people or in some cases really large groups of people. And it's shocking to see that. To your point though, Tabor, I'm also like, my wife and I have lived in a neighborhood in Atlanta of retirees mostly. And all we've done so far is just try to offer our ability to get out there and help, you know, our neighbors. Brendan, do you see sort of a divide between, I would say people like ourselves who are fortunate enough where we're not in the service industry where we can broadcast from our apartments where we can continue to write and to find new ways to develop material and content that divide between those people who are basically still making a living at home and those who are just out of the game now at this point. Yeah, hugely, hugely, there's a massive class dynamic to all of this, you know, British people say that about everything I know this, but it's actually true in this situation. There's a huge class divide. The UK, for example, I'm sure this is true of lots of other Western countries. It's now very, very divided between, you know, the kind of cultural elites and the media elites who can largely still carry on working, making their podcasts, writing their articles, doing their public sector work or whatever else it might be. And then, you know, actual hardworking, what we refer to as working class people who have been completely demobilized and effectively put under house arrest and it's now essentially unlawful for them to work. Millions of them have lost their jobs. Millions more are living on 80% of their wage. The government is paying people 80% of their wage for the next three months. So it's an extraordinary state of affairs. It's very divided. How people experience it is very divided. I come from a London Irish background. So that means pretty much everyone I'm related to works in the building trade and which means they are actually productive people unlike me and they're all really, really worried. They're deeply worried about what the future holds for them. They're losing money. I know someone who is no longer going to be able to buy the house that he was planning to buy which is devastating to him and his young family. So this is having serious consequences and I think it's gonna store up a lot of political class social tensions for the next few months in fact, for the next few years in a way that it plays out. I think at the moment, some people are enjoying the lockdown which probably means they just really want to get back to working and being free. Brandon, my brother is a construction manager and but in a sector that was deemed and he works in New York and primarily New York City and in a sector that was deemed non-essential. So he had to lay off, I think 50 people a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure it's more by now. I haven't talked to it. How is your family kind of handling a lot of this and the kind of people that you grew up with and know? Well, my family aren't in too bad a position because lots of construction projects are still going ahead involved in some of those projects. So that's all actually fine. But I do know other people, friends of mine who work in parts of the building trade who have been laid off. And also people in the service sector and the retail sector who I know are completely screwed now, really are screwed. Some of them even missed out. I mean, our government bailout has been fairly generous, I think in terms of if you compare it with other Western nations. The government is paying 80% of the way every single person who can do a lot of work which is going to cost millions and millions of pounds. So it's quite generous and it's helping people to survive. But having said that, if your wage just about covers your weekly outgoings, for your wage to suddenly be cut, I don't think it's a very serious problem. So there are a lot of people I know personally who are worried about how they're going to get through the next few months and are worried about what they're going to do once the lockdown is over. Because I think the thing that's scaring people is the question of what their future holds. And I've noticed that people are starting to become more scared of the economic crisis than they are of the virus itself, which I think is quite interesting. Yeah, I've seen that too. Yeah, a little while back I posted a poll where what are you more worried about? Choice A was lives, Choice B was businesses or Choice C was both because I'm an adult. And there's something interesting happening, I think, where you have this either or choice, the idea that these things aren't connected that you can't be worried about these two things and the ramifications. And I'm also worried when we have the government defining what is essential and what is not essential, at what point will there be a redefinition or at least an easing up on what trades are allowed to either go continue as normal or continue with slight changes. So there was a columnist, Carol Markowitz, wrote about in the New York Post recently about how important it is for the government officials to get ahead of this and say what we can't expect when it comes to which stores can we expect to open and how soon. And I guess it's a little tough where the government seems to have dropped the ball both state and federal on so many levels where now you also questioned their decision making to begin with. Yeah, what you just said to Lewis is kind of what I was getting at the beginning of this, which is that the understanding that what the economy actually is, is human beings interacting with each other. I mean, people make it about money and numbers and the stock market and stuff that feels very abstract to a lot of people but what it actually is is just all of us making stuff, trading with each other, consuming stuff. Like it's really us just making the world a better place little bit by bit by adding our little bits of value to it to not understand that it's not a trade off between humans and the economy because humans are the economy. I mean, that's what it actually is. It's, I think it's been at the root of a lot of the policy making because I think a lot of the policy making really did see that economy or think that it was like, oh, we'll just, we'll save these people's lives, we'll lose some money, that's it. We don't have to worry about anything beyond like losing some money. And you're like, no, no, the money is not the point. The fact that people aren't actually making anything, producing anything, they're not able to continue the production process that like drives the standard of living around the world. And by the way, we've only so far we've only talked about the first world, really. We haven't even talked about how it's gonna hit India. You know, I mean, like the parts of the world that rely on Western business to literally survive in a really visceral way. I mean, that's another thing that I'm super worried about for the same kind of reasons. Cause it's like, we see people getting laid off and they're gonna struggle and maybe they'll go bankrupt or whatever. Not that many people we know are going to say starve to death. That is not true of most of Africa, a lot of South America, India, Pakistan. Like it's, I mean, there are bigger problems around the world that are sort of looming in the background and not that far off, I don't think. Matthew, do you wanna jump in? I'm glad that Sean validated my approach of the economy being entirely about me in my life. So that's a pretty good start here. He's talking about production on pretty basic things, you know, some of the goods around the world missing that with the create unknown, especially with our podcast we talk about into lots of different types of creatives. And because of what we do on YouTube, we're networked with creatives of all kinds. You know, it's 99% of our days and we're seeing disruptions in creative work as well. It's really strange. It's not just the supply chain, things like foodstuffs. Even the creative work is kind of bonkers right now. And we're really gonna see it with TV. We're talking about some TV production stuff now and it's crazy, it's so weird because we have to talk as if everything is normal. We have to plan as if these plans might actually happen. And so, you know, it's like, oh, we need a three-day shoot. That yeah, let's schedule that for the first week in May. Like all of us know that this is not going to happen. There's no chance that we're going to get 20 people in like LA to come together and like cough in each other's mouths for three days. At least not in the next few weeks, but we still have to proceed as though everything's normal. So at some point, reality is gonna kick in and we're gonna have fewer creative projects out there. So we're gonna see it with all the things that you guys have mentioned, but all the stuff we don't really think about being disrupted too. There's a question. Yeah, I was gonna say, did you see the question? We got a question here for anybody, really. Is there any way to incentivize companies big and small to encourage remote work and freelancing? Brandon, what are your thoughts on that? Companies are doing that right now, but you know, there is some work that can't be done remotely and which can't be done on a free and on-spaces. You know, when I cycle around London at the moment and kind of it's like the day of the triphids, you know, when the city is just completely and utterly empty, but there are still some workers and that is people fixing roads, the delivery guys are still out there and of course, nurses and doctors, you see them on their way to work. So there are some jobs that just have to carry on and you have to go to a certain place and do a particular thing. So I think there are probably limitations to how much companies can incentivize remote work in particular. The other thing I think which is I completely agree with Sean about some of the fallout from this stuff, I think the broader problem is that no one is thinking about the tyranny of money because you know, we can't, but sometimes you can become so focused on something that you don't think about the broader picture and you don't think about the potential unintended consequences of money. There's a really interesting piece in The New York Times a few days ago saying what's happened to all because there's lots of anecdotal data now that hospitals in New York and other cities have far fewer heart attack and stroke patients than they would normally expect. So presumably those people are staying at home and not going to the hospital in a timely fashion and that could seriously impact on their life expectancy as a consequence because of the COVID-19 panic because everyone thinks they will catch it if they go to hospital, because everyone thinks they have to ease the burden on the health service. So that's just one example of an unintended consequence of a kind of hysterical approach to a problem like COVID-19, I think that economic crash the economy, you will lower people's life expectancy. And so I think that's the kind of broader question that we need to factor into all of this. You know, people will die earlier or kill themselves or become alcoholics. I mean, there are a serious number of experts who are now warning of these problems. And so I think there are certain things companies can do. They should definitely incentivize carrying on working with us. What a question this is like and needs to ask itself is how are we going to count economic problem that is looming on the horizon? I feel like a big part of this has been if it's going to be a tremendous test of humanity at this point and how people come out of it, not only from the macroeconomics standpoint, but also personal standpoints as well. And for me, the last couple of few months have been pretty insane. I'll describe just three cases pretty shortly. So one of them, I have a friend of mine who has been on a list for a heart transplant for, I believe, over a year. And we recorded a podcast together and he said he was feeling really bad so he wanted to go in the next day to the hospital. He went in the next day to the hospital while all this COVID stuff is kicking in. Somehow he ended up getting bumped on the list. He goes and he gets his heart transplant, right? And we're so happy and this is amazing. And then I get a text from his brother saying he tested positive for COVID-19, right? So it's one thing after the other. My father was struck by what we thought was a stroke back in February. Fortunately, he managed to get himself in front of a really great neurologist who diagnosed it as the Gillian-Barre syndrome, which is a neurological disorder. And fortunately, my dad didn't have a really hard, rough case of it and was coming out of it on his own. But the doctor was very worried about it. He's like, I don't want to put you in hospital for five to seven days to treat you with antibiotics with all this stuff going around. And then on an even more personal note, my wife gave birth to our son during this whole thing. And it was during a period where a few hospitals in New York City were not allowing support partners to come and be with their pregnant wives during delivery. So leading up to that, it had an emotional toll on me and my wife wondering, would our hospital be the next hospital to say, you can't be there? So I feel like there's just so much going on right now that's really testing everybody. And I'm wondering maybe at this point, if you guys have any advice on how to stay strong, stay sane as one of the premises of this conversation so that when we get out of it, we're better off for it or at least not worse off. Weirdly, I think Tabor has at least partly the right idea of sort of looking inward a little bit and kind of staying out of social media a little bit. And I have not been good about that in general. Although I did get better at it the last couple of weeks is the first run up to all of this. I think like a lot of people, I was really just hyper-focused on everything that was going on as we've kind of gotten into the higher death counts and all that kind of stuff where pretty much the news and social media all they're doing every day is just reporting on how many fatalities there were. I had to step back, in part, because there's nothing you can do at that point. I mean, from that standpoint, there's really nothing you can. There's no benefit to doing that. But also because it's actually like sort of not really healthy for you to wallow in those kinds of numbers a whole lot, especially out of context. Not that this isn't bad, but I mean, one of the things that I learned early on in this is that the United States, in the United States alone, about 7,500 people a day die every day. And this is a big chunk of that right now. What's happening is a big spike in the percentage of sort of daily mortality. But that's kind of like a shocking, horrifying kind of thing to really think about. And if you're single-mindedly wallowing in that, it's not going to be good for your health or your mentality or any of that kind of stuff. And also, I think, fortunately, I think we've, if he anyway, has been quasi-remote anyway in a lot of ways. Like we use Slack a lot. We have an open office, which sort of has the hilarious side effect of making people not talk to each other in direct ways, but rather just talk on Slack all day instead. And so weirdly, we had a lot of practice with this. So I get to still interact with coworkers. We're having these kinds of conversations. I certainly would encourage people to get on video chat with their friends, talk to people, especially if you're feeling lonely, like please reach out to people. Because that's really where it's at, I think. I really, really strongly agree with that, particularly my top tip for coping with this period is to switch off the TV news. Because the TV news has been horrific. I mean, I don't know if the US has been as bad as the UK. I'm guessing it has been. Yeah. But in the UK, it's just horrendous. There's this daily death toll, which is announced by the government. And it's latched onto by all these kind of TV news people who almost seem to wallow in it. It's someone, I can't remember who it was, but some journalists refer to it as pandemic porn, where you're kind of waiting for the death toll and almost enjoying the kind of thrill of being in a nation that has suddenly become like a dystopia full of this daily ritual of waiting to find out how many people have died. It's horrendous. It's horrific. And the news coverage has very often been completely context-free, completely analysis-free. They very rarely tell us the age of the people who are dying or how many underlying conditions they had, all of which is entire. But then if a young person dies and a couple of young people in the UK have died, that gets flagged up constantly as proof that anyone can die from this virus. But that's just factually, scientifically incorrect. So there's a deep irresponsibility to some of that coverage. It really brought to mind CS Lewis in the 1950s wrote a really good essay about fear of the atomic bomb. Because of course, in the 50s and 60s, lots of people lived in a state of fear about the bomb. And he said, the way to get over this fear is to stop thinking about the bomb. And his point was, so if they do bomb us, at least we'll be doing something nice in the university. Reading a book or talking to our family members, or maybe similarly about very serious public discussions about it, like this one. But I think on a personal level, when you switch off and you stop working, stop thinking about it. Don't watch the TV news. Don't read the newspapers unless you find it interesting and valuable. And do something else. Watch Tiger King, read a book, talk to your friends. Anything like that. All of those are small acts of resistance against this kind of wall of dread that the media is pushing out. So we have to resist that as much. Because that will make people ill too. I think people are being made ill by the constant horrible death obsessed coverage. I think that's a really important point. I want to hit on a couple of different things and call back to some of the discussions. But especially among young kids that are kind of college going age, high school kids, right? What Brendan says with stress of thinking about this stuff. There's some huge questions right now about things like college admissions for current high school juniors in the US. What is this process going to be like? What happens with things like student housing when colleges have a bunch of people holding over from last time and fewer vacancies there? Like, there are very practical questions about how college is going to go. And I can understand being 16, 17 and really stressed about that. No matter how much you stress out about it though, it's not going to open up a dorm room for you in 2022. So you might as well do some of these other things and kind of get on with it. I think that's pretty healthy. Jumping back to Lazaro Quintana's question about incentivizing the companies to encourage remote work and freelancing. You know, they're forced into it. I don't know what kind of incentives we need to provide at this point. If you're not trying to maximize that kind of thing right now, it's probably not going to work out even when you're given some kind of incentive. You should be doing it anyway. And it's been interesting for me, as somebody who has worked remotely for 15 years basically in a bunch of different countries and now working on YouTube, I don't see anybody. Like every couple of months, I have like face-to-face contact with somebody in the YouTube world. But it's all of us doing different stuff in different places. And so we're very experienced with that and very efficient with it. Seeing a bunch of other people struggle with that for the first time is kind of interesting to me. Well, so on that note, Matt, I mean, I would like to maybe shift the conversation in that territory. I think all of us, the four of us have all had a lot of experience working from home for a lot of years, or at least working remotely in different contexts. I think maybe if we have anything to say about how to be effective about that. I mean, I spent, you know, when I first started doing this kind of work about 10 years ago, I freelance for about a year and a half. And that entire time was remote, not only in the sort of specific sense, but I was on the other side of the country for most of my clients. Most of my clients were in D.C. or New York. I was living in Los Angeles when I first started. You know, and I think there are habits that you kind of develop over time, working from home, working remotely that are probably a struggle for a lot of people. I've written about a lot about how to build successful creative teams. And one of the things that I've said repeatedly in that process is allowing people the freedom to explore their own, what John Police called creative oasis, where you have your own sort of way of getting into a creative workspace or your own kind of way of getting into an open mindset. And that's gonna be different for different people. Some people like to listen to music. Some people are, because I have a background in music, I'm actually super distracted by music, but I could have the TV on, I could have movies on whatever, watch movies on the background and tune those out. But if I put a piece of music on, especially something that I like, my brain immediately just goes straight to that and I can't do anything else. So I think starting to get really introspective about what makes it easy for you to get into a flow of whatever it is that you're doing, I think that that's something that people should be exploring right now as they're working from home. But what do you guys think? What do you guys do that helps you? Yeah, and Brendan, we have you for only a few more minutes, so I would love to hear what you have to say on that. Yeah, I think I have found myself giving people tips about working from, because lots of my friends who'd never worked from home are now working from home. And I've worked from home two or three days a week for the past five years, really. My key tip is have a routine. You have to, my number one tip is get dressed. There's always the risk that you will sit around in your underpants and start your work in bed, looking at your phone, answering emails. I think that kind of stuff's always a mistake. It's really important to get up, have a shower, put on some clothes, have some breakfast and then find a part of your apartment or your house, which is a workplace. So it's not your living room, it's not the place where you hang out, it's not the place where you sit down and watch TV, but it's something a bit separate. I think all of that stuff helps to make it feel like you're in your work zone now and you're focused. And then that means work doesn't dribble too much into your personal life as well. So I think maintaining that distinction between your everyday life and your personal emotions and your work, but also quite important. So having a routine, sticking to it as much as possible, trying to finish work at a reasonable time, all of those are very useful approaches. But also talking to people, I think having online meetings with colleagues is so important and physically getting to people you work with. I think it's so important to maintain the sense that you're a worker, rather than someone who's in his house doing stuff that he gets paid for. Because then there's the real danger with that is the work overtakes your whole life, because it becomes completely meshed with your daily existence. So maintaining some kind of sense of distance between what you do in your house and what you do for your job, I think that's quite important. You know, I had this thought a couple of days ago and it's too sort of banal in a way to like make a big pronouncement out of it. But I was thinking if there was one little piece of advice I would have given to myself 10 years ago or probably 15 years ago, it would be to actually shave every day. And it's for exactly this reason. It's because every time I do that, it starts this like, and I don't mean that in a literal sense, like not everybody should, if you wanna have a beard, whatever, fine, you know, but what I mean is like have that routine of I'm getting cleaned up, I'm getting presentable, I'm going to be ready to face whatever the day is. And if, you know, I have to go meet somebody or whatever else, like I feel confident and good about myself because I've taken the time to just have a little bit of pride in myself in the morning. And that I would have told myself because I didn't do it for a long time and I've done it for the last five or so years and it's made a huge difference in the way that I think about getting up and going to work remotely even every day. And it's exactly for that kind of reason. I think I can speak for everyone on this panel and say that our hearts go out to all the men who are incapable of growing beards even during this quarantine. Sorry, fellas, it's a great world when you're able to cover your face with hair clothing. Although on that note, I'm so bad at maintaining my own beard. I always end up just messing up and having to like take it way shorter than I wanted it to be and all that. But that's my cross to bear in these very difficult times. I'd be tabers cross to bear as well, looking at Mountain Man over there, but you know. I haven't shaved in two days. Brendan, before you go, I just want to ask you about the commentary on your Prime Minister Boris Johnson who was taken ill with COVID-19 and it looks like he's come out of it. But it looks like there were quite a few people sort of almost praising COVID-19 as if it were an assassin's bullet that was going to carry out their political revolution. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about that before you say goodbye. Yeah, you know, the left in the UK has behaved pretty disgracefully during the COVID crisis. It's almost like they see COVID as the thing that can achieve what they have failed to achieve, you know, because the left has not done very well in elections in this country for quite a long time. And they're kind of cheering COVID on and hoping that it will harm the Tory party, which is Boris Johnson's party, and also that it will bring in kind of state socialism, this kind of constant welfareism, which is their dream of how society should be organised. It's like, comrade COVID. I mean, it really is quite depraved, you know. Democracy has failed them so they're hoping a virus will come in and do that work for them. It's actually pretty disgusting and also quite funny. But in relation to Boris Johnson, he's now getting better. He's come out with intensive care. I mean, it was quite shocking that the leader of the United Kingdom, the man who was leading the fight against the virus, was suddenly so poorly that he was in intensive care. So I think that actually dealt a real massive blow to the nation into a sense of national collective spirit. So it's actually really, really important that he's getting well now, that's actually really good. My personal view of Boris, I've met Boris a few times when he was editor of the Spectator Magazine. He used to commission me to write articles. So I've always been very favourable towards him. I actually think he's doing a fairly good job of seeing us through this crisis. I know that sounds counterintuitive because we currently have a high number of deaths, but he is trying to strike a careful balance between preventing deaths as much as possible while also thinking out loud about how we get out of this lockdown. I think a few more leaders of Western nation think very carefully about how do we protect the old and the vulnerable from the virus and how do we get out of the lockdown soon so that young, healthy, working people can get the economy back to life. That's foremost in Boris' mind and I think it should be foremost in everyone else's as well. Cool. Well, Brendan, thank you so much for joining us. We hope to see you again. And also, if anybody out there is not familiar with Brendan's work, go to Spike Magazine. He's one of my favorite commentators, authors. He's fantastic, so thank you, Brendan. Okay, now that the Brit is gone, we get to talk American, all right? That's right. That's right. Well, a few things that I wanted to talk about, as we look to the future and sort of move away from more discussion about what the economy holds, just looking at like sort of how social interaction will be affected in the futures, like Sean, you talked about, wanting to go see your buddy's band at their reunion. What does this mean for live performances down the road? And even things like, I know a number of people, I know at least three people who have had relatives pass away and they can't attend their funerals. It's just, it's... You know, on the flip side, I always feel like people think of these two events as sort of opposite, but like I've had actually a number of friends who've gotten married during all of this and who had to have weddings that were just the two of them and like one sort of minister or somebody who officiated the ceremony and like literally nobody else there pretty much. And all of those kinds of things, I mean, people would spend a lot of effort, time and energy and money trying to, trying to bring people together for these kinds of events and how important some of these things are to social cohesiveness and just building and maintaining relationships with people. I mean, I think going back to your question about the concert, I mean, I think a lot of people think of a lot of that kind of stuff as really frivolous but shared experiences between large groups of human individuals. There's a body of psychological research on the value of those kinds of shared experiences in forming empathy with people who are not like yourself in terms of sharing, because a lot of times the way that I spent a lot of my time especially with out of frame thinking about art and I'm a kind of a neuroscience nerd mostly concentrated on how neuroscience and art connect and how your brain and art interact. And one of the things that's really fascinating about a lot of this stuff is that like when you watch a movie or you experience a play or even I mean, and it's related into this like going to a comedy show and everybody laughing at the same jokes together, what you're doing is practicing and your brain is treating it the same way as if you were engaging in that experience yourself. So if you watch a really thrilling car chase, your brain is experiencing it like some form of a really thrilling car chase. So you're developing neural pathways that give you an opportunity to sort of practice these experiences. And when Roger Ebert said something that I always loved which is that movies, and this was in his, the documentary that was made at the very end of his life called, called Life Itself. Roger Ebert said that movies are a machine that creates empathy. And the fact that people go or used to go to these kinds of community experiences and have these moments where they would share an experience that created empathy with a character, with a situation, with a time period in history, with a comedian, right? Like those are bonding experiences to all of the people who are in the audience that makes all of us as human beings more interconnected. And I always think of that as being an incredibly good thing for humanity and society, to look around an audience to see people of all shapes, size of colors, whatever, and know that we're all laughing at the same joke. That's an amazing thing to be able to experience with other people. You know, I'm happy you brought up Roger Ebert because basically his life's work is available on, I think it's rogerebert.com. And there's nothing I like more than seeing a movie that he was reviewing when he was alive and then being able to go and read his review of that movie. He's a fantastic movie reviewer. And it's sort of like in these times while we're cooped up and all that, it gives us opportunities to explore new things that we hadn't seen before. If I have to give one recommendation for Roger Ebert review, it would probably be his review of the movie, The Grey, which I don't know if you guys saw with Liam Neeson. I have seen that movie. I'm trying to remember if I've read that review though. I don't think so. It's a fantastic review. So without giving too much of a... It was not an amazing movie, I will give it that. We're gonna have to have a fight, Sean Malone, when we're able to meet in person, I'm gonna have to fight you over The Grey. I love that movie. But no, I'm sure you have good reasons for not. It's fine. We can disagree. I'm just gonna put it in the fine. It's fine, Cary. I'm gonna put it in the like... I don't hate it. It's fine. I almost... Could you just hate it? Because it's like the fine character, you know, it's... All right. We have... Matthew will get to you in a second. We have a question from Maruko Arts. Do the art... Does the arts... Wait, what? I don't know if that's a person's name. I think that's part of the name. Okay, sorry about that. How do you think social gathering places like theaters will be affected by all of this? And I think it's been a long time before movie theaters and not just movie theaters, but like any kind of theater gets even remotely back where it was if at all. I mean, I think there's a theater that my wife and I go to all the time in Atlanta called at the North to Cab Mall, which is sort of a dirt mall, sorry, North to Cab Mall, but it's the cheap theater. And we go there several... Like most of the time we go there once a week, like now obviously we haven't been going there for the last couple of months or whatever, but we go there a lot. And it's, you know, I think $4.99 matinees and on Sundays and Saturdays, and like $7 regular movies and stuff. We go there all the time. And it's the only thing that is keeping this dirt mall alive. It's that and a comic book store and a Burlington Coat Factory. And that's literally the only things, the three things that exist in that mall that are driving any kind of traffic at all. I'm genuinely concerned that when we get out of this, that theater is not going to be there. I have no idea. I have no idea where it's going to be. I'm worried that that's probably the one, one of the ones that's at the highest risk in Atlanta. I think there are a couple others that are probably in the same financial boat where they're either carrying another kind of dead mall when at mall, it's kind of like that. By the way, a lot of these malls you probably, even if you don't live in Atlanta, you've probably seen because they're now getting used as sets for things like stranger things and the Watchman stuff on HBO, whatever. No, I think that a lot of that industry is going to be in really dire trouble. And I think it's going to continue to be in dire trouble for six plus months after, even after the lockdown's end, because I think the social trust and the idea of re-entering really public spaces is going to be very difficult for a lot of people to get their minds around. And I think it's going to take a lot of kind of braver people to go, okay, I'm going to go to the theater. I'm going to be around people. There's going to be people coughing next to me in the theater and I'm not going to freak out about that. Like I'm going to be okay with it. Matt? Yeah, we have some data that just popped on this in the last couple of days. Very broadly, this phenomenon that Sean's describing about big public events, right? And it was in the context of sports. Somebody at Seton Hall did this, asking about would you go to a sports game, right? And I forget the timeline on it, whether it was this in 2020 or in the very near future or what, right? But it was relevant to what we're discussing here and something like 72% of people just said, no, I'm not going to do this. And the remainder were split between I would go or yes, I would go with social distancing. So in the context of an arena, that means they would sell like every fourth ticket so people could be spaced out properly. Like this is a really strange thing when you think about going to something like a college basketball game, right? But this is indicative to me of how people are thinking about these large public gatherings, whether it's going shopping, going to Walmart. Let me tell you this, Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon in my part of the world, Walmart is a significant public gathering, right? Like this is a public event because everybody has the time to go. That's a thing. So is going to the movies. So is going to a game. So is going to a middle school band concert. Anytime you're getting 800 people together in a room, 800 people are now going to think about how they want to play that, right? So we have a really big shift in attitudes. And I do think a lot about Las Vegas in the strip because I spend a lot of time there and it is so radically different than my life here. There truly is not anything that is as significantly different as the Las Vegas strip. And I think about what it's like to sit down at a slot machine with 15 buttons that God knows who has touched how many times that day, because he knows do a very good job of cleaning machines and stuff like that. But still nobody ever thinks about that. No, when you sit down at the machine, you're concerned about like, am I going to lose some money and how quickly am I going to get a free drink? That's it. Now you're going to sit down and think like, do I need to wipe down the buttons at a slot machine? And all of a sudden this really fun frivolous activity that you're there to enjoy has this little hurdle of responsibility, of stress, of analysis. It's going to be a long time before that stuff phases out and everybody kind of relaxes. You brought up something that I didn't think about before, which was you mentioned school band concerts. And one of the things, cause I grew up doing that. I mean, again, my background is as a performing musician and then as a composer. And so my, you know, from fifth grade on was lots and lots of band concerts and then honor bands and then college ensembles. I was in the first couple of years I was in college. I was in 11 different ensembles. And one of the things I didn't really think about till you just said that was that a concert, and I blew, I think you'll appreciate this a lot too, is performing in front of a live audience and a big audience especially is a radically different experience and training to perform in front of a live audience is a radically different experience than playing in front of a computer, playing in front up because I've seen, and this is very awesome. And it's very, I'm so glad to see a lot of this stuff is like, like there have been some high school and grade school bands around the country that are doing these giant Zoom calls where everybody gets their instruments out in place, tries to play together via, you know, sort of a remote distance learning kind of platform or whatever. And I love that stuff. Cause it's the best people can do in a world where they're not allowed to build that community but there's no substitute. There is absolutely no substitute for the real thing. It's almost like a bittersweet reminder of what we are actually sacrificing at this point. Before we close up shop, I had this thought of just sort of, if there was a show that I could point to that sort of just describes the moment in time that we're in. I don't know if you guys have ever watched The Masked Singer on Fox? The Masked? Like one episode. Okay. It's insane because the show was obviously pre-taped, right? So as the show's going on, there is no coronavirus whatsoever. So they bring up things like March Madness, you know, like doing promos for March Madness and all that. And it's such a bonkers like a show that seems to be taking place in a different reality where there is no coronavirus. And there's just this weird effect of listening to some of the most beautiful voices saying heartfelt ballads that are bringing tears to your eyes and they're dressed like cartoon characters. So like a kangaroo with boxing gloves. Bill Withers just passed away. There was a character on this show, The Banana. Somebody dressed like a big giant banana singing lean on me. I'm trying to figure this out, but it is such a trippy experience. So maybe if anybody out there is looking to trip a little bit, start watching The Masked Singer. I mean, man, that's, but you know, Matt brought this up earlier too, which was like just the whole TV schedule of movies and stuff like all of these things, there are a lot of things that were in productions. The life cycle of a television show or of a major motion picture especially is really long. I mean, it takes sometimes two years, three years more in animated movie cases. And some Pixar movies have taken four years to make. And so, or longer, depending on if you want to count the writing process or whatever. So there's like this backlog of a lot of things that were just getting finished or in the editing process or whatever that is still gonna come out. But I think much like what we saw during the writer strike in 2006, 2007, somewhere in that I don't remember exactly what year that was, I'm an old man, so I don't know if anybody else remembers the WGA strike back then. But what happened was there weren't any productions getting made for a period of months. And then predictably that next season, the season after that had just nothing but reality shifts because they had nothing else. They had no scripted television. Nobody had any idea what to do. And so like these things where we go, oh, great, we've got, we can watch the Tiger King right now, but like new Tiger Kings aren't getting made at the moment. So we're not gonna see the effects of that for another year or in some cases, two years. And I think that's going back to that seen and unseen thing we were talking about at the very, very beginning of this. I really encourage people to think longer term on those things and not just think like, oh, okay, everything is gonna be perfectly back normal right after this. Yeah, Matt? Oh, you're on mute. Oh, I'm mute. Here we go. My space bar didn't work. Yeah, the unintended consequences that Brendan was talking about. I wanted to say this when he was still here. I think that a lot of people underestimate how long that's going to go in extremely practical ways. So I look at this and know that there's a little sexy time happening right now between quarantine couples, right? The December, January, whatever, boom is going to be a real thing in childbirth, right? So what that means is that the 2024, 2025 kindergarten class in a lot of different areas is going to be a major swell. That means more teachers. It means pushing some schools that are already at capacity for a small rural area like mine. It means that there could be 100 kids per grade instead of the 56 or 60 that it's been reduced to. And then all of a sudden a small rural public school district has to blow its budget out of the water relative to its populace. And when it's everybody around here generally being older people, retired, fixed income, the local tax increase on those people is a significant force. So when I see something like this, I wanna remind people that the little butterfly effect here in the trickle down and whatever you wanna call it is going to be an extremely real thing for years and years and years in just the most common sense ways. I'm already worrying about what that bill is going to look like for a lot of school districts in New York state that are small where it's much harder to adjust to certain things when you're little than it is to adjust when you're a massive school system. And I just look at that and I know, hey, five years from now, my parents are gonna get a bill that they're really, it's really gonna smack them in the face. And it's a weird feeling, but the best you can do is to kind of prepare for that kind of stuff and get your own affairs in order. I think that's really maybe a pretty decent place to kind of end on maybe talking about preparedness, I guess. And really one of the things that's really important about thinking, we generally call it the economic way of thinking, but really thinking through those unintended consequences and thinking through the longer term sort of network effects of all of the decisions that get made. I think the best thing most people can do right now is really take stock of everything around them, everything in their life that they like or don't like and try to sort of think through that chain. And once you do that, try to turn that into some practical steps that you can say like, look, I'm worried that inflation is going to be a pretty serious factor of the next several years because we've just dropped literally $6 trillion, up to the $7.5 trillion on the economy, double the annual federal budget that cannot come without side effects, right? And so thinking about what, if you have investments, thinking about that, if you just thinking about how you're saving for different things or whether or not you want to buy a house now or something else. I mean, there are all these things that you're going to want to think about. I think starting to think about some of that stuff right now is probably a really wise move that people could start making. Right on. Cool. Well, guys, thank you so much for making the time. I really hope that all the fans of Fee enjoyed the conversation. If you liked it, please like, subscribe, do all that stuff to Fee. And once again, I'm Lou Perez with... And also let's give a shout out to We The Internet, man. Oh, yeah. Yes. So where would they find your channel? You can find We The Internet TV on YouTube and Facebook. You can follow us on Twitter as well. And I am the Lou Perez on all social media, I think, so far. And Tabor, would you like to give some plugs? Unmute yourself and then give some plugs. Yeah, Lou, are you the Lou Perez on OnlyFans as well? I just want to be clear about whether you're really using that handle on every screen. Yeah, The Create Unknown. You can check us out on Twitter at create unknown. One thing I want to say, though, is thanks to the people from our podcast who have jumped in the chat, it's actually been an extremely beneficial thing through all of the last few weeks. To talk to people from around the world in our Discord server, I look through the chat and I see Blasteroidus from the UK. Marco, who asked the question about theaters, he's in Puerto Rico. Dojangles is in Southern California. Jay Funke is a hobo who rides the rails throughout the United States. So it's just a totally kind of fun thing to see how everybody's dealing with stuff. It relaxes you to talk to these people. And I would encourage anybody listening to this to find some community on Twitter, on Facebook, anywhere. That's just a healthy way to talk to people in other spots. If everybody's around you, it gets weird, it gets old, it's too personal, it sucks. Find these people spread across the world and it will absolutely reduce your blood pressure and increase your sanity. Yeah, check out Vsauce2 and The Create Unknown. Excellent. Thank you, everybody. We did it. Ha, ha, ha.