The Economic Trade-off of Coronavirus w/Michael Shermer | Joe Rogan

Mr. Shermer, how are you, sir? 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, you know, 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, 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'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 coming 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. Yeah. And then they have to adjust to Zoom bombing because, of course, there's people like that out there that 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 def, why not just watch movies at home? No, 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. I mean, how many gyms are going to go under? How many yoga studios? I mean, it's a strange and trying time for people who have small businesses, for sure. Yeah, one of my cycling buddies owns the La Cajonada 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. And OK, 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 the 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. You know, 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. Well, but at some point, you know, 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? You know, 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. You know, 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? And the figure is, well, the high-end figure is about $10 million. And after 9-11, the families got paid off, I think it was $250,000 a person times the $3,000 something. And, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, at some point, that's the kind of calculation we're going to have to do for what we're in now. Thank you.