Joe Rogan Criticizes Lack of Planning for Re-opening the Economy

It's really complicated, right? It's like who should be able to decide when you can or can't go back to work. It's not straightforward, it's not cut and dry. Because if you say the people should be allowed to make their own decision, you run into the very real possibility that especially if you have to go to work at that factory and you can't not work and you do get sick and you do go home and you do spread it to your family, a loved one could die. It's real. On the other hand, the government doesn't really seem to have any sort of straightforward plan as to how people can economically bounce back from this. There was one of the weirdest quotes, I think it was Trump that said this, we were talking about businesses and restaurants that they'll be open maybe not with the same owners, but they'll be open again. Did you see that quote? No, I didn't see that. But it's like what does that really mean? Does that just mean like a different business will be created? That's exactly what it means. It means that he's just being pragmatic and maybe cold, whoever made that quote, that is probably how it's going to go down. Trump says restaurants will make come back just maybe with new owners. Yeah, that's what he said. That does not make me feel good, man, if I'm a restaurant owner. There's a few restaurants that I'm always shouting out on the podcast that are owned by friends of mine that these businesses are hurting so bad. They went like that to no customers or a very small percentage of customers who were to take out when they had dine-in every night and they have these bills and they had their business set up in a way that you have to make X amount of money in order to stay open. And they were successful and they're doing well and one of the toughest businesses to be successful in. And then all of a sudden the rug gets pulled out. So what's the solution? Could people just be able to go to restaurants and everybody works there as a waiter or a cook, or they just maybe get sick and then more people die? Boy, that doesn't sound good to anybody either. So what is the solution? I don't know, but I don't think that in our particular case, I don't think our governor has the answers. One of the things he's been criticized for is he's decided to open up production for television and films, but not churches. There's another thing they've done that's really nuts and my friend Adam Curry turned me on too. They closed Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but liquor stores were an essential business. That's not good government. It's not good thinking. There's so many things where they've put into place these lists of what's approved and not approved and I just don't think that it's an... First of all, I think the information's constantly changing and I think that they're going off this old information and they haven't made adjustments. And then on top of it, I don't think they're qualified to. I don't think they're qualified, just like we were talking about a president, like one person who's involved in the economy and environment and all these different things. I don't think one governor can really be smart enough to know, A, what kind of impact's going to have economically to close all these businesses down, and B, which ones get to open up and what is essential and why. It's very frustrating for all involved and it highlights one of the reasons why the way we do government is it's not perfect. It's definitely better than a lot of ways, a lot of places in the world, but still, there's a lot of holes in it. Yeah. I share your frustration with constantly changing messages. What is essential in one state versus in another state? The issue of churches is a big one. On the other hand, in Massachusetts, churches were included in the first phase of reopening and a lot of public health officials say that doesn't make any sense. The suspicion is that it's there because of a lot of pressure and that it probably should have been in phase two or maybe even phase three. I think it's hard to really talk about the state by state without acknowledging the disastrous response from the federal government. I don't know where you stand. You may totally disagree with me on that. I think that there's a lot of straw men that are being put in place to argue that Trump handled it beautifully, to use his term. I think if you start with the idea of the coordinated federal response we could have had, a lot of these other issues that we're having now just wouldn't be issues. I'm glad to get into it more if you want. I don't know if you've talked about that a lot. Yeah. I think it'd be really interesting to talk about this because what do you think they could have done differently? What do you think the government should have done differently, the federal government? Got it. The narrative has been a lot of two sides that are arguing. People who just vaguely say Trump failed, he didn't do enough and he was slow without like really giving specifics, which I will give. And then on the other hand, you've got a lot of people who are just reflexively defending, hey, he shut down travel from China really early and he took it seriously. And we've done the most tests, which is a whole other fiasco, a talking point that we can get into. But for the most part, I think that the critiques and the praise is just not tied to real dates. So in January, we had our first case January 20th, I think it was, and South Korea had their first case January 20th. We then often skip over February. So a lot of people will defend Trump by saying, you're not going to shut down a country when you've got one case. And I totally agree. You're not going to shut down a country over one case. We're not going to shut down a country over 15 cases. There was this point where we had 15 and Trump said, we've got 15 and soon it's going to be zero. I don't think that it was logical at that point to say shut it all down, but just to like pick a date and then we can work around it. March 5, okay. March 5, China had 80,000 cases. So we already had proof that like this was going to be big. Italy had 4,000 cases. So this is March 5. So we already had proof that it'll travel really far and it'll get bad far from China. And we had 221 cases on March 5. It would be very reasonable on March 5 for Trump to say, this is a problem. FDR like delivery. I know hard to imagine Trump doing that, but we've got to work together. This is going to be difficult. We're going to do a 30 day. I need all 50 governors to help me on this. Let's do 30 days of stay at home. He probably would have then on April 5th have had to ask for another 30. So we would have done like 60 days March 5 to May 5. And where would we be right now? We'd be in really, really good shape. So it's really easy to just say, dude, you're not going to shut down a country with five cases. I don't, I agree, but we had the information on March 5th, March 10th, March. Well, right at any one of these points, if we did a real shutdown, we'd be in such good shape. First of all, I think that the support for a shutdown that early would have been almost zero. I think you would have a really hard time convincing people that this was going to be that big of a deal and that there wouldn't be something they could do to stop. I think a lot of this is Monday morning, cured quarterbacking, right? We're looking at what happened factually, like we're looking at it in the past. This is when we're, there was this amount of cases that when it was happening live, there was a lot of confusion. First of all, the World Health Organization as recently as January was saying that according to China, this is what they wrote on a tweet, it doesn't get transmitted from person to person. So this is in January, right? In March, they were saying you don't need a mask. There's been a lot of confusion. It's not like there was real straightforward, clear advice. It's hard for us. It's so easy for us to sit back, here we are in late May and say, oh, he should have done this. And if he'd done that, everything would have been great. The support for shutting down the whole country for 30 days at the beginning of March was zero. I don't think anybody would have agreed with that. There's no question. There's no question. And I also, I think I do think we want to be careful though, if we, if we write any retrospective analysis off as Monday morning, quarterbacking, it's then it's not even worth discussing, right? Because we could just say, throw it out. It's Monday morning, quarterbacking. I mean, you're right. You're right. Yeah. No, it's, it's definitely look, it clearly wasn't perfect. So there's always going to be room for critique, but like what the idea that we could have shut everything down, boy, that is a, that is such a hard sell. Remember when Cuomo was saying that they're not going to shut down New York. It'd be too hard to shut down New York. Yeah, I think Cuomo and de Blasio share, I mean, they're, they're not, you know, they're Democrats and Trump's a Republican. I don't care about that. I mean, certainly there, there's no doubt that Cuomo and de Blasio are deserving of some blame here as well. In one other example, there was a period we'd have to look at covidtracking.org to get the exact numbers, but there was a period in either late March or early April where South Korea, remember South Korea had their first case the same day we did within out within like six or eight hours. It might've been January, 1920 or vice versa, but there was a point in late March or early April where South Korea had as many positive tests in a day as we did tests total. So this is really important to understand the discrepancy here. There was a day where we like tested 800 people in the United States and they did so many tests that they had 800 positive cases. And so the slow testing response is a disaster. And the proof is, you know, we can say it's Monday morning quarterbacking, but South Korea got it right. Taiwan got it right. In terms of places in Europe, Greece did really well. New Zealand did really well. So we may be looking at it retrospectively, but there were examples of countries that were on the ball with testing and it made a huge difference.