The Ricochet Podcast - COVID Symposium: Ricochet Members Speak

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

The coverage surrounding COVID-19 is mostly pundits, politicians, and policy wonks yelling at each other. If you want to end the lockdown, they say you want old people to die. If you want to extend the lockdown, they say you want to destroy the economy. This leaves out the rest of us: that vast majority of everyday people who want to protect our physical health along with our economic health. Source

Hey, everyone. So we have been talking at Ricochet about wanting to highlight all of your stories, all of your experiences. It feels like everyone, the folks who are leading these conversations are the people who work in public health and hospitals and epidemiology, and they all have jobs right now. And they are the ones leading these conversations and they have very little expertise in the world of business or education, things of that nature, mental health. So we've been chatting at Ricochet about how we could sort of drive this conversation somehow about the human cost of the lockdowns. And then we had this like duh moment of we have the most amazing members in the world and we should just be handing the baton over to them to have you guys tell your stories. So we've been

doing that with our symposium and we want to continue doing that with our symposium. So if you haven't contributed yet, please, please do so. We've had some incredible stories and I know that there are so many more out there. So, I mean, that's basically what we wanted to do. If people wanted to sort of have conversations here, we hope to continue doing this in the next couple weeks and months. Maybe not every week, but every other week, I'm not sure, once a month. But so if you are sitting home and watching this now, and maybe if you were watching last night and felt like you wanted to talk, this is the opportunity for you guys to jump in and actually

tell your stories. So think about what you might want to say. I'll hand it over to John to make sure that I haven't missed anything. And yeah, when we first talked about doing this, the main thing is the frustration many of our members are seeing and all of us as well is if you tune into the news or, you know, read various websites, other websites, especially it's all these experts, quote unquote, you know, you'll have immunologists on there, you will have various doctors, you will have a lot of politicians, a lot of hot take opinion writers, but they don't talk about actual people throughout this country who are dealing with. And, you know, my kids have been, you know, stuck at home for a month and a half now, their school is over. My eldest is graduating high school this year,

and that's just been utter chaos. So everybody is at home here, and the same thing is happening all over the country. You have some people who live alone or just kind of stuck there alone. You have people with huge families. You have people who have been furloughed. You have other people who are working harder than they've ever worked because they might work in one of these fields that's kind of understaffed right now. So the frustration, especially watching cable news, is just they never talk about 99.8% of the nation. They just yell at, you know, CNN yells at Fox, Fox yells at MSNBC, and the real story isn't being told. And we would just love to hear from our members. So everybody participating in it, we thank you.

You are the stars of the show. We will kind of moderate and try to keep things rolling. But the main thing isn't for Bethany or I or Max to yammer our hotcakes about what's going on. We want to hear from real people. So you have the floor. Speaking of real people, let's hear from our good friend, long-term member, Richard Adams,

who's in Brooklyn, which is- Well, I'm sort of in Brooklyn. I lived there for a long time. I've now retreated to the banks of the other side of Manhattan. I'm in Jersey City now. Oh, well. I turn on my camera and give you a view of Manhattan, but I can't seem to figure out how to do that.

That's fine. Yeah, John, I'm sorry. My daughter's a junior, and it's been disruptive enough that I can't imagine what it would be like to have a kid in her, I believe, senior year of high school and have all of the fun stuff taken away. I'm sorry about that. That's thanks. So just a little, you know, bite-sized piece of weirdness in New York. So I've ready to make a real estate move in December and didn't happen. And suddenly we fell in love with this house in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, the highest views of Manhattan and 10 minutes by bike to the best surf spot in New York, in the New York and the tri-state area. And the house was on the market and then suddenly went off the market because the two descendants, the people, the daughters of the 103-year-old guy who just died, who was a Navy vet, World War II vet, and lifer in the Navy, were so scared to show the house, they took it off the market. And this was a place that convinced me to leave New York City after 51 years. And people are genuinely scared here. There are little old ladies who are sitting and cowering in their houses and don't want to leave.

And it's sort of for the first time, life has changed very much here. And we're all so consistent and wearing masks. But it got in the way of commerce sort of for the first time and as sort of clinical as that sounds, you realize that everything has stopped. When real estate stops in the tri-state area, you understand that everything has stopped. That's the one, you know, Wall Street and that are the two ineffable, you know, dynamics and it just stopped dead. You've never heard a real estate agent say, yeah, there's nothing I can do. There's always something they can do. It's an odd experience to see a place that's so driven by commerce stop dead.

The streets are quiet. It's dead silent on 2nd Avenue. It's a bizarre situation. Rob Long described it pretty well in the last Zoom. I mean, it is an odd place. It's weird. Yeah, we bought our house actually right as the pandemic was sort of ramping up. We closed on this March 17th. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. So thank God. I mean, we, we kind of view it as like, it was like fate. We, um, we saw the house in mid February and we were not really planning on buying a

house, but our, our agent sort of said like, there's this house, it's in your price range. It's really big. It's almost, there's no pictures online. It's in your price range. It's really big. It's almost, there's no pictures online. It's certainly a gut job. And we walked in and we were like, oh, this is not a gut job. This is amazing. And so we put in an offer that day and the owner is 90 something, 92, 93, and immediately had to go to assisted living. And so they said, we want a 30 day close. And we were like, we don't want a 30 day close. We didn't even want to buy a house, but we did it. And then we closed on March 17th or 18th. I don't, it was like, it was my son's birthday. So it was like the day before the day

after like one of those days, 17, 18, 16. And, um, and we all had to wear masks. And we were like sitting at a card table in the middle of the dining room. And then as we were closing and signing the papers, our lawyer got a text message from his office that the county had shut, like, we promise we'll file whenever we can. And then my real estate agent had to go home and print it in her printer because we're standing in the middle of an empty house. It was like it was a nightmare. It took hours and hours and hours. And we couldn't find anyone to watch our kids because no one would watch our kids. Yeah. Who was going to take that on? Yeah, exactly.

So they were running around the house like tearing things apart but now you know i've been talking to my real estate agent and she's just like everything is crushing and burning like my entire my entire business is uh dead and the lawyer who did our closing is like i had to lay off my entire staff because I can't pay them and it's a lot of those kinds of stories Emily Zanotti who is on Lady Brains with me a lot of her husband's business model

is doing closings for real estate and they're feeling the pinch yeah he's an attorney yeah sole proprietors are absolutely sucking wind. It's terrible. I mean, it would be deadly, you know, because you're working on commissions. And so the work that you're doing isn't going to bear fruit for months.

So if you have several months where you're not doing anything, that's just extending it out so long into the future that you're you're yeah going through hard times we got um when we moved here a year and a half ago we hired a not very great moving company and um and the moving company just sent an email to every single one of their former clients that said if you're thinking about a move please hire us we're here and we can't pay our bills. And that, like, I mean, the shockwaves from this with the real estate is something that not a lot of people are talking about. And I'm curious to see sort of what happens because people are going to have to start moving eventually.

Richard, you didn't buy a place because they didn't want to sell it anymore? The listing expired on Thursday. We sort of discovered it two weeks ago and went whole hog. But they told us they couldn't show us. They couldn't show us.

So we... But what's your living situation right now? We, I own in Brooklyn. Oh, okay. So the, John, you'll appreciate this. The guy who died at, I think it was 102, Stephanie told me, I think it was over 100.

Ex-Navy guy out of World War II who ran the – there was a proving ground or something like that up out in minutes from his house in Jersey. And bought the house 70 years ago or something like that. That's amazing. or something like that, lived there the entire time. And then the real estate agent whose listing was expiring on Thursday sent me his disclosure form. And when I tell you this was as tucked and tied as I've seen anything, he was like, oh, yeah, the toilet in the basement hasn't been used since 1953. We capped it. We removed the oil.

I mean, we had every receipt going back to 1952. It was sort of, it felt like it was gizmo. It was going to happen. But the two old ladies living inside of it didn't want to show it, which was understandable. And, you know, the lifting expired. Well, believe me, I'll have that place. One way or the other, I will have that place.

If I have to kill them both, I'll have the place. But we'll figure it out. But it is interesting in that, you know, like the as you know, Max, you know, there's nothing more aggressive than, you know, Max, you know,

there's nothing more aggressive than, you know, a real estate agent who realizes they have a real buyer. And the woman just threw up her hands and said, yeah, you know, this is uncharted territory. Well, hopefully that will eventually go through for you. Nice to talk to you. Nice to talk to you, Tim. Bye-bye.

Michael, how's it going? Good. I'm glad you guys are doing this. This is a great little forum. So I'm down in Louisiana and north of New Orleans. And fortunately, we've been kind of isolated up here from the city. So we haven't had too great of an effect. And I've been fortunate.

I've been able to work because I'm an editor, a video editor. I brought my edit suite basically to my apartment, and we're shooting some stuff, but we had to get creative, and I've been using Zoom a lot myself. That's why you have that hunky picture on. That's what you're saying, yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't say that's what you're saying yeah yeah um so i wouldn't say that's uh louisiana though no i'm originally from michigan that's uh that that picture is from michigan yeah oh we're in michigan that is actually at a ski resort called schuss mountain up in man oh okay my uh parents are both from the up up or sioux saint marie so been up there a few times it's

beautiful yeah yeah uh the thing i wanted to kind of talk about a little bit is the in the UP, Uper, Sioux St. Marie. Been up there a few times. It's beautiful. Yeah, yeah. The thing I wanted to kind of talk about a little bit is the social aspect of it. I'm a longtime member of a group that likes to remain anonymous, but we meet regularly, and a lot of people rely on that community and being physically present with other people. And we haven't been able to do that, obviously.

And so, again, I've been on so many Zooms over the last couple of months, it's kind of ridiculous, but it has affected people. And people are not attending those types of meetings, and it affects their psychological makeup and they get testy and things like that then they you know put themselves in situations that can be life threatening for them so that's another effect that this is all having and we're starting to open up a little bit there's a lot of people that are just like i'm not i'm not going out in the public regardless and they're gonna i mean that's part my my situation

is i'm i'm staying in as much as i can and i've seen a lot of people like when i have gone out shopping and i'll wear my mask inside but you know there's a lot of cavalier attitude out there and it is a little worrisome you feel like you've gotten hit a lot in Louisiana because I know that there was a lot of concern with Mardi Gras but I and then I saw sort of like a week or two that seemed bad but it's kind of hard to get a sense of how hard you guys have been hit. It's mostly been in the city and it was they did get hit pretty bad down there but uh i know some people there that have been working down there and they were over prepared uh like a lot of places uh better to be over than under yeah um and then um up here like we're on

the other side of the lake pontchartrain so so we've got a 25-mile bridge in between us. And there's three nursing homes within five miles of where I'm at, and they got hit really hard. And so a lot of the numbers that you see from my parish are from those places. Yeah, so in New Hampshire, where I am, it's 73% of our deaths are in nursing homes. And we have not had a single person in the entire state die who was under the age of 60,

who didn't have some kind of preexisting serious condition. So that's the younger than 60, there've only been like 10 people who sadly passed away, but they all had very serious other conditions. Michael, what are those meetings like on Zoom? Can you kind of explain a little bit, like what's the difference between sort of an in-person meeting and a Zoom meeting?

In an in-person meeting, a Zoom meeting? In an in-person meeting, you know, you obviously get to shake hands and hugs and be in a room with people that have a lot of the same energy and that sort of thing, and you get an actual feel for it. And I've been going to those meetings for almost 26 years now. Wow, that's great. You know, but on the Zoom, it's really cool. I mean, I like it. I'm a kind of a techie guy anyway, and it's been kind of fun. And the other thing that's really cool is that we've gotten people from all over the country into certain meetings. And, you know, and actually I was in a meeting at 1.30 a.m. Saturday morning with some people in Australia.

Wow, that's cool. Was that common before this, or was this kind of like a cool, strange byproduct? Not common. There were some that were already set up and established. Some were actually like phone conference meetings and other things like that. But I was involved with some people who were going to set one of these up anyway, about a couple of weeks before everything hit. And then it just happened to be that we're like, okay, let's do some more. And then we've, we've gotten into the set, you know, trying to set it up

because early on we were, you know, being new to Zoom, we were getting the Zoom bombers pretty heavy for a couple of times. And to me. It's amazing how odd that can be. That was why I was just messaging, I was joking around with Scott before we started because the last time I did a Zoom, I hosted it, we got bombed. And I was like, I have to, I can't, I can't do that again. Yeah, it's pretty odd. Usually, occasionally, we've set up waiting rooms and we have protocols where we assign certain people co-hosts and they can boot people out and block some stuff like that. But the waiting room part of it does actually, as far as what I've heard, deters a lot of people from actually trying to even get into the room. You know, if they run into that, then they just say, oh, I'll skip to the next one kind of thing.

Because there are a lot of them that are still just Wild West. And they're just, hey, here's my numbers and here's everything. And they post it online and anybody can get it. And, you know, so that's a little odd. But, you know, most of the experience I've had on those are really good. And there were two times where I sort of just observed from sort of death notices on Facebook that like something, there was like a bad batch or something because there were a lot of obituaries shared. And I'm, so I've noticed those two sort of waves of higher deaths of people from my hometown. And I've started to notice a wave on my social media of like people in those circles. And they're all sort of, you know, I mean, you never know, but young people,

and you're always kind of like, was that COVID or was it something else? Like, have you sort of observed in your social circles that there are that like something to that effect like that there's a spike of some kind that you feel like is attributed attributable to social isolation there's a lot of there's a lot of people that are just reluctant to try to do anything online. And so they just skip out on, you know, doing something that they should be doing to keep their sanity and then they lose their sanity. And then, like I said before,

that puts them in a position to be life threatening, depending on how bad they are. And so, yeah, we were, I've, I've heard a few stories here and there about some people, you know, just kind of going off the deep end a little bit. And it's, I look at it like, I mean, they when things open up a little bit, that we're going to have a wave of people coming into those types of meetings because, uh, anytime I, anytime I listened to, um, uh, James Dellingpole and those guys over in England, they're like, everybody's drinking so much more. Oh my God.

I've noticed that in my parent Facebook groups, someone asked a couple weeks ago, it was like a week or two ago, someone said, how do you know when you're drinking too much? And I commented and I said, if you're asking that question, I think that you know the answer. And there was like 150 comments of people who were commenting after me like, oh, this is how much I'm drinking much I'm drinking and I'm like first of all that's not a normal amount um second of all the first the original poster this is not helpful to them reassuring them that they should be drinking themselves into a stupor every night is not what that person needed. And like, I've no... I think we lost your audio, Bethany. Can anybody hear Bethany? I cannot. I'll just add until she gets her audio back. Thank you very much, Michael. And yeah, it's a very serious thing. I've seen a lot more people, and it's usually done jokingly. But yeah, oh, look how much I'm drinking, look how much wine. Yeah, I'm going to the liquor store again.

In my family, I'm a Finnish extraction, so about half of my extended family has some issues with the bottle, let's say, especially the older they are, the worse it's been. So I've always just seen that example mercifully. I've been able to avoid a lot of that. And also too, just with the kids home and stuff, you know, I don't really have the opportunity if I wanted to pursue that, but you have a whole bunch of people, like you're saying, without their support network. And whether it's a specific group for that, or just their friends who keep them honest, keep them on the up and up, maybe they get together every week. You know, I have buddies, we'll get together once a month, at least we'll have a lunch with one guy go out to this particular restaurant with another guy. And we all just kind of hold each other accountable and make sure we're all, you know, everything's fine.

I have one who I haven't talked to in a while and he's been plugging me. So I'm calling him after the zoom thing because just trying to hold each other accountable, but it's hard to do remotely. Yeah. So Barry, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. Hey, how's it going? So far so good. It's a little early though. Always plenty of time for the day to go to heck and hand.

Well, it's 940 where I am. I don't know where you are. Atlanta, or at least the suburbs of Atlanta. There's nothing really spectacular about this for me, but I'll do some anecdotal stuff for the family.

I've got a son that's a firefighter for the city of Atlanta, and he's a paramedic. And this is for Bethany. He's delivered three babies, which is more than a lot of doctors that I know. So looking for some more. And it's impacting the stories that I hear from him is they never have enough PPE to go around and he's a lieutenant and they canceled or postponed the captain's exam again so it's having small effects like that it's about ready to just butcher my mom because she desperately wants to get out and see the grandkids and that's not

happening as long as they're little petri dishes uh they're nasty stuff um she's 85 i'm perfectly okay i'm 64 so i'm i'm spectacular but in two months i turn 65 i'm gonna wrap myself in bubble wrap never leave the house because then that's that's about day before your birthday you'll be fine yeah and then after your birthday acting up all kinds of fur balls and everything else but um the biggest thing that i've seen is is that all of my friends that live away from georgia have been casting aspersion on the government here for opening up early it's like oh my god you can't go get your haircut. You can't go to the dentist. I've finally got my dental appointment to get

an implant put in next week. But it's like, how can you do that? They're dying by the bucket loads in Georgia. Oh, please, grow up. It has allowed me to identify all of my liberal friends who don't read anything but the New York Times and the Washington Post.

I was going to ask you about Georgia because we were all assured that you would all be dead by now. Yeah, and bodies are stacked in the street. You can't hardly get through anywhere. they've pulled out the snow plows that we have to move the bodies off of the streets and pack them in the salt that we have stored for all the ice and snow that comes through. So no, not at all. In fact, there are fewer people in the hospital with COVID now than there have been since before what used to be income tax day in early April. So the numbers of people that are testing positive for COVID

have gone up in the last week, but that's because testing has gone up rather exponentially. The number of deaths, daily deaths, has declined. And to me, the important number is how many people are in the hospital, how many people are in critical care, and that's declined. If they wanted to flatten the curve, we've done that. I need to get another haircut. So that's, you know, not affecting me, but then I'm studying to be a hermit anyway.

So it's not a big deal. And John, I don't recognize you without a coffee cup. Yeah, all I have is my water cup here. So I'll just see if I have time. It's too see-through. I actually got a haircut. As you can see, my gorgeous shorter hair on Tuesday, I think it was. I think it was Tuesday. And gosh, that felt good. I think they cut a pound off of hair. But I think the frustration too is you have all these people in Manhattan, not even the other boroughs, in Manhattan, pointing fingers and lecturing people in Georgia. How dare you in Florida open up beaches? It's like half of Florida is a freaking beach. I used to live there. It's like they're allowed to do this. And it's like, okay, New York City is the epicenter of this for the US. Why are you lecturing everyone else? And I can understand pretty extreme measures

when you're stacked up, you know, they keep saying stacked up like cordwood, the bodies, but that's how people live in New York, you need to. Everybody's crammed into these tiny little apartments all over the place. I can understand having one solution to that. It does not apply for a town in rural Georgia, an expansive exurb outside of Atlanta. Here in Arizona, it's just not a thing. And I think just there's been a lot of negative reaction around the country to be scolded by people who have done a worse job than the rest of us have, you know, and maybe it's just a climactic condition, a lot of travel in and out of New York city. And again, just very close.

Everybody lives close to each other. So those, those elements are not their fault, but to be mocked and lectured and look at these rubes and fly over country. Why don't you fix your own business, especially with nursing homes, and then you can tell us how to live our lives because it seems to be going pretty well in most countries. It's pretty annoying. I was pretty encouraged with the most recent podcast from Dr.

Jay Long, Indian name that I can't really remember how to spell. Benacharya. Yeah. Don't ask me how to spell that, though. Yeah. Too many consonants in that. But it's becoming obvious that the, we're not going to beat this thing.

We're just going to have to outlive it. Yeah. And he said, and I found this interesting, everybody's hanging their hat on a vaccine coming up. His observation was, is there is no COVID virus infection yet that they've managed to have an effective vaccine for. Why do we think one's going to pop up now?

It might, but it might not. I also wonder how many people will actually consent to it after all is said and done, if they end up finding a vaccine. I'm in a, again, sorry, I keep on talking about this Facebook group, but I feel like it's a good pulse of like pretty mainstream parents who are all like upper middle class. Everyone vaccinates for the most part for everything else. And someone asked recently, if it comes up and it's available come fall,

will you get it? I would say 40% of the people in the group said no. And these are all people who vaccinate for everything else. Barry, thanks so much. Thank you, Barry. group said no. And these are all people who vaccinate for everything else. Barry, thanks so much. Thank you, Barry. So next up we have, I'm not sure this is his real name. I'm going to guess not. The actual Mitch Hedberg from Minnesota. Welcome. Isn't he dead? Unfortunately. Yeah, that's what I thought.

He lives on on YouTube. Well, that's what I thought. He lives on YouTube. Well, I'm trying to unmute him, but there we go, Mitch. My bad, y'all. You don't sound like Mitch. I'm starting to doubt this. I'm sorry, guys. So I just wanted to share, I got laid off back in, I'm in Maryland. Oh, me too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great city of Gaithersburg. Okay, not far. I got laid off like in February and it was a huge downer, man. We got like, we got two kids, two and one. What do you do? Well, this is the interesting part. So now I always had a night job where I work, like, in the dead of night, and I manage web conferences, not like this,

but, like, for big companies and governments and things and so it just happened to be that they said hey just come on full-time and so now I just do this job full-time and so like I said I've been doing that yeah that web thing for like I don't know like over three years or so um just making some extra coin just getting paid and um i don't know i just i just wanted to share that with the group because there's always something and i know that's a weird it's a weird job and it takes a weird person to do that at like my next call is at like 2 a.m. and then I gotta call it 4 a.m. but um there's always business out there and I'm just I'm just really happy to uh to be a part of it yeah that's that's the kind of like really interesting thing to me is like seeing how the economy is all interconnected and seeing how there are some businesses that are suddenly like experiencing crazy windfalls like Zoom and OutSchool,

all of these sort of Instacart places who never really expected to have a boom suddenly in boom country. It's an interesting economics lesson. Yeah, man. All right. Yeah, man. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having the meeting. Yeah. Yeah.

Thanks so much. Thanks for contributing. Yeah. Okay. Andrew. Hey, I'm in Songnam, South Korea. Oh, cool. I write little bits under the name Dottimo uh on ricochet and i'm 52

but you're always a kid to your parents right yeah and so i've got two parents back in oklahoma senior citizens and when this outbreak started this is the second one I've been here for. There was SARS a few years ago. Right. And my parents were petrified about this coronavirus when it started. The outbreak started here. And so now it's kind of my job to tell them, you can live your life to some degree. They're in a town called Yukon that's about 17 miles west of Oklahoma City, 23,000 people surrounded by farmland, no cases there. So what I tell them is what I try to tell people on Ricochet. I'm absolutely no expert.

I was a classical radio guy in Oklahoma. No medical experience at all. But life went on here. I got haircuts all through this pandemic. The peak period, I got haircuts. through this pandemic, the peak period. I got haircuts. We went out to eat. I taught at a couple of offices, taught English to executives, and taught at some hagwons, which are the after-school academies Korean kids go to.

And during all of this coronavirus, Hakwon was closed maybe three days. The missus who runs an office, electronics office, office was closed one day during all this. Songnam is a city well over a million people and a suburb of Seoul, 10 million people. We're still taking subways, still taking the bus. And so I joined Ricochet actually to listen to everybody's view on this because I can't figure out what's going on in the United States, honestly. Neither can I. It's bizarre, in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the difference, I mean, people sort of talk about, you know, in South Korea, they did this.

And I think that it's just very different culturally, for better or for worse, that there was a lot more willingness for the monitoring and the masks. And there was a lot more, I mean, culturally, I've lived in Asia before, and culturally, the willingness to wear a mask has always been there, and it's not uncommon ever to see people in masks, and so I think that, I mean, because a lot of these outbreaks have started there, but here, it's completely unknown. Yeah, and there is a habit of wearing masks here also because of the pollution that comes in from China. Yeah. I used to live in Phnom Penh and I have asthma and it's never been an issue for me except for in Phnom Penh because the pollution and I,

I like had to weigh, like, do I wear a mask and suffocate in the mask? Or do I not wear a mask and suffocate because of the pollution? And I, it's been so long since I've lived in Phnom Penh that I kind of forgot that because that was the last time I ever had asthma issues. And now I'm wearing a mask all the time. And I'm like, Oh, right, I can't breathe. I remember. Yeah. And we're required to wear them when we teach, but you can get on the subway, and you can get on the bus, and you can go into the markets, the grocery store, even department stores without them. And do people? Yes.

Wow. We need to have like kind of a nuanced conversation about masks because I'm not anti mask. But this is not a long term solution to expect everyone to wear masks because you just that's not a thing that we do. I teach for six and a half hours and have to wear a mask the entire time and teaching language and they can't see your mouth. Yeah, that's huge. And so everyone was gaslighting me today on Twitter and they were like, in South Korea, no one minds. I'm like, I don't think that's true. I'm going to push back on you. So thank you. Yeah, it brings a small minority, but yeah, there's a lot of people who don't wear masks, including. Interesting. So what do you attribute the difference in? Because, I mean, you guys haven't had the death rates, right? Like nothing close to us. Not at all. Quite low. So. Maybe part of it is how they count deaths, do you think? Yes.

Comorbidities and all that. Yes. Now, I've experienced the healthcare system here in several different ways. Silly things like plantar fasciitis. Last week I had an eye problem. I got three kinds of medicine and an appointment with the eye doctor for $13. Healthcare system here is excellent. I don't know how the insurance is funded. I don't know any of that stuff.

I have an insurance card because I've been here for a long time. They do treat very fast. Not a lot of personal touch. If you go to the dentist, it's going to hurt. It's going to work, but it's going to hurt. So if I have dental problem, I wait until I'm in the States. Good call. But it's affordable.

So I think one story that might interest you is Colorado. I was just talking to Kelly Maher, who also does the Lady Brains podcast with me. And she said her station, because she works for a TV station in Colorado and Denver. They investigated the death rates in Colorado because they were well over a thousand. And then people who work at the station had friends who were working in the coroner's office and they were labeling deaths of someone who had a heart attack. But then when they swabbed the person after death, they realized they happened to have COVID. That was not why they died. It was because they had a heart attack that was completely unrelated to their viral infection, which was asymptomatic. And so those people started asking questions of the state of how are you classifying

deaths from COVID versus deaths with COVID. And when those questions started, the death rate went from, I think it was like 1,200 to about 800. It was a really significant difference. It was like a 25%. Yeah. Of course, Max knows. Yeah. And I also read that there was one person who was in his 30s who died from a drug overdose, but he had... He happened to have it. Yeah. And he was classified as death. Sad, sad death. I mean, here in New Hampshire, we've been dealing with a drug epidemic for years.

And those people, it's not the same as catching a virus, obviously, because there's a certain amount of, you know, addiction. But addiction is addiction. It's a, you know, it's a terrible thing. And those people, you know, have been dying all around us. Yeah. And for years. And we didn't shut down our entire economy for that. Right, but it's also not infectious the same way.

No. Andrew, thank you for the perspective from South Korea, and thank you for joining Ricochet to share that with us. Yeah, thank you for having this. It's good to listen to everybody back home, because I only have the Oklahoma perspective for my family. Well, keep on writing for us us too. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you so much, Doug. Hey, how's it going? Oh, excellent. Excellent. This is a wonderful and interesting little chat useful to it.

I don't know if you can tell, but I'm from Kirkland, Washington. Where the, where it all started basically and in fact the uh life care center kirkland's perhaps a mile from me so we've been kind of in a state of panic for quite some time now but it's starting to i mean people like all over the country were, how far we were promised that we just needed to flatten the curve. There was no promise that would reduce the death count necessarily from the disease, but we wouldn't flood our medical systems, right? I mean, that was the initial reason. However, now, you know, it goes on. We flattened the curve nicely in Washington. It's

not the chaos that we all feared at the time. We're got it under control. There are deaths, but we had one yesterday. And in fact, Saturday, we didn't have any deaths. So we're getting it figured out. But the economic devastation is bad. It's tragic. I know a lot of people that have been hurt very badly. And perversely, I'm in commercial real estate. And we're going to have a cage match tomorrow between a buyer and seller on 11 hotels. I mean, it's a half a billion dollar deal. We'll see if it works out. And the precipitating cause, of course, is a very kind, very nice gentleman.

He's 82 years old. He's built this lovely empire of these hotel chains. They're very well sorted out boutique hotels, and he's getting killed. I mean, this has just been devastating. There are hotels, the hospitality industry, as with bars and restaurants and whatnot, are all just, I mean, it's tragic. I mean, it's just devastating. Now this guy's going to walk away with a lot of money.

He's 82. You know, do I want to die in this ditch fighting this one and suffer miserably for five years? Well, say three years before the hotel industry really sort of recovers and gets back to profitability. And he says no. So now we've got to argue about price he has pretty enthusiastic expectations on pricing but we'll sort it out

these guys have lots of cash the buyer does but yeah so I feel kind of guilty that I should be a beneficiary of all this human misery but it is what it is do what we can that I should be a beneficiary of all this human misery, but it is what it is.

Do what we can. So, and what's helped us a lot too here to kind of temper everyone's anxiety and anger about being cooped up is we've had a miserable spring. I don't know if you've heard about Seattle weather, but it's been pretty wretched. So that's kind of kept everybody in the house anyway. So we haven't suffered over much. But, you know, we're going to start having sun.

And I just did a drive around into Seattle today just because I was going nuts. And everybody, there's a bunch of people in the street. It's almost like normal went to the parks went down around green lake and there are thousands of people running with their kids and the dogs it was all very charming and lovely but it looked very normal yeah what i've observed is that people are still going out. There's still plenty of cars on the road in my area. People go to the grocery store to, you know, there's a Walmart an hour from here. I've been to at least once. It was packed. So people are still doing everything, but all the

small businesses are closed. You can't get a book at the local bookstore. You can get the book at Walmart. This makes no sense. Yeah, this isn't a shutdown. This is a small business smashdown. To me, it doesn't make sense. Let me bring in one of your neighbors, Doug. Carol. You there, Carol? I'm here. neighbors, Doug. Carol. You there, Carol? I'm here.

I know you're both in the same state, so to me that's like your neighbors. Yeah, see the text. So a couple weeks ago, Ray and I drove up to La Conner. I don't know, Doug, if you've been to La Conner lately. Oh, not lately, but yeah, lovely.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and you guys will have to wait for my May 25th Ricochet post because I'll post what I found in La Conner. I was surprised at how many cars there were on the main street, but the majority of the places were not doing business. And it's just very sad. I mean, I resent not being able to go get a haircut or a pedicure.

But where do you live, Carol? In Everett. In Everett. Yeah. Both my husband and I work in the aerospace industry. My last birthday, I was 71. And I'm still working. My goal in life has basically been to work forever and never retire until I die with my boots on. Hear, hear. Hear, hear. And, I mean, go visit RushBabe49.com. I have all sorts of posts about that.

But our industry has not been treated very kindly, and it's not all the epidemic either. We're suffering with the whole Boeing thing. But, obviously, we are in an essential industry, and we've both been kept working. On the last working day of March at noon, we were notified that the company would be shutting down for the first two weeks of April. Everybody's on furlough for the next two weeks. If you have vacation, you can use it. If you don't, you can take leave without pay.

So I was very fortunate in that I have lots of vacation hours. I rarely take vacation. So I had a two-week, essentially, of vacation. But there were a lot of people that didn't. So now we come back the second week, the third end of the second week of April, and our business has been affected very adversely. During the layoff, I was offered a voluntary separation package, which once I read it actually turned out to be pretty generous. But I'm thinking, I'm not ready to retire yet. But so I decided when we got back that I would ask my supervisor if there was any possibility of negotiating an actual retirement, like later in the summer.

And she said, basically, no. So a couple days later, she comes by my desk and says, congratulations, I've earned you another month. So now we're going to delay your retirement until the end of May. And so I said, okay, that's fair. So I signed the papers and went for the furlough for the retirement at the end of May. Well, they've had some other reductions in force in the factory. And my supervisors have now decided that

they're going to need me until the end of the summer. So I thought it was the end of September, but neither of myself nor my supervisor can count. They were counting May as one of the months. So now I'll be retiring at the end of August, but it'll be a real retirement, not a forced retirement, essentially. But actually, I still get to keep the package, so I'm going to be actually in pretty good shape, but they're going to miss me, and I'm going to miss working i can't imagine not having something to get up for in the morning but i mean we've been lucky our factory had 700 people and they've had exactly two cases of people getting sick with covid and both of them worked in

the same department now interesting i don't know if you're aware of the geography of Washington. The west side of the state, of course, is very dominant with its trees and the lovely mountains and water and whatnot. Where I grew up in eastern Washington, it's it's it's a land climate it's it's colder colder than a well digger's ass and Tom Waits words in the winter and it's a hundred in the summer it's not as hot as in Phoenix but we have a very extreme range and it's very arid we got sagebrush and cheatgrass and no folks I grew up in a village of 600 people and my parents, the ranch is still there. And Eastern Washington, because it's very sparsely populated, generally isolated,

except along the freeways, they're having no particular problem with the COVID crisis. They're completely shut down. They can't do anything. They're in lockstep with us. And Inslee, who's a bit of a buffoon, doesn't have the amount of imagination to realize that he can regionally lighten up on the people in eastern Washington that will have no negative effects. There's no threat of overwhelming

the hospital system such as it is over there. My mother's 86 years old and she's in a cubicle and she's kind of a steely willed, gimlet eyed old lady and she's not loving this one single bit.

And it just doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem right. You notice that Inslee's not lacking for haircuts. Hey, yeah, good point. He's sneaking out on us. No, he probably has his hairdresser come in. Yeah, I suspect my boss, who's very wealthy,

that we have some Zoom broker meetings here from time to time. He's looking very dapper and trimmed. I'm going to is very wealthy that we have some Zoom broker meetings here from time to time. He's looking very dapper and trimmed. I'm going to bug him about that. Where'd that guy come from? I got an email from somebody this morning, a friend of mine from Ricochet, who said he saw me on the thing last night and said I was looking pretty scraggly. So, this is the way I normally look, so.

Embrace the scrag. Yeah. Thanks, Doug. Thanks, Carol, so much. And we'll look forward to it. Yeah, keep up the great work. Thank you. We're here. So we've been going about an hour,

and this has been, I think, very fascinating. Yeah, I've loved it the story yeah we have to do this again so yeah bethany if you want to just maybe wrap up a little bit and we'll say good evening to everybody yeah so i feel kind of bad because i made jenna promise that she would talk oh but um i'm sorry i like i dm'd her and was like you're coming right and so i hate to leave her um jenna can jenna can do you want to chat now or because i kind of put you on the spot a little bit or do you want to talk at the next meeting do you want to be the first person that that jumps on the next one what would you it absolutely makes, I don't want to impose on anybody.

So if everyone is, I mean, it's nine o'clock here, it's 10 o'clock there. I'm sure kids have. No school. There's no school. We are. Well, I agree. So I, if there is time. Yeah.

Please. So I work in what I have discovered in an essential industry which is i work in a pet store um and uh many people have their their furry members of their family and um so they have to eat too um and for our governor in Minnesota here, he closed things March 28th. And how toilet paper was to grocery stores, dog food and cat food was to us. And it was a shock to everybody. And when the initial panic subsided and people were locked down, our pet store is located in a strip mall, which also has a nail salon, hairdressers, restaurants very close by. And all those people, you know, we haven't heard from since.

Many of them lost their jobs. They came in with their last paychecks to get food for their pets. People deciding what they can and cannot afford. We have donation bins for local shelters, and a lot of it has been kind of rifled through from people that have no other choice. We have a lot of scrappers that we call them that hunt the streets for scrap metal and they stop in the store they have their dogs and cats with them. So it's really something that we hadn't witnessed for a really long time even during the recession. So it's kind of take the temperature

of the community. So it was that and also the attitude of people that still had their jobs and couldn't understand why everyone wasn't on board with the quarantine. And I think, you know, I talked to my husband, you know, sometimes I'd come home sobbing because the mean people seem to get a lot meaner. The nice people got nicer. You know, claiming that we're hiding dog food in our storage room. Why are the shelves empty? Why can't you get our, you know, vegan, grain-free, specialty small batch dog food? Well, you know what, we're in a pandemic and everything is shut down. So it was a very much a life lesson, especially to work with some high school kids that work in cashiers. No school.

They don't understand what's going on. They've never experienced 9-11, obviously. So it was really heartbreaking. All of a sudden, they can't see friends. So you kind of see the whole spectrum of people from the affluent to, you know, a few elderly people that were defiant and we're going to go out and I got my little cat. We're going to be okay. And so it's still a process, but hopefully we'll see an end to it soon. That was kind of my long version of a short story

I appreciate it it's actually funny I've been thinking about before you wrote I've been thinking about what about all the pets at the pet stores were they okay yes I'm glad to know they are yeah and we actually had the a lot of people have been adopting pets from the shelters because they're at home yes yes I have i it's a story for another time but and don't tell the lady brain squirrels because i haven't told them yet because they're all going to judge me but we're we're going to get a dog oh it's been like it's been like a whole process of trying to i'll tell the story but i i don't want to tell anyone yet because mary catherine yelled at me and they're all going to yell at me and so i'm trying to get yelled at

separately and i haven't told them yet. So don't tell them yet. I've only told Mary Catherine. It's the best. Good job. Thanks so much for, uh, yeah. Well, thank you for, um, just providing this forum for, for people, um, in middle of America, uh, to tell it, because I think, you know, especially in Minnesota, if I can just be brief, everything seems to flow from the outside in,

and we were expecting what was going to happen in New York, and when it didn't, you know, people were just holding their breath, holding their breath. And, you know, I think just how John and I think Rob alluded to it yesterday, everywhere is not New York, thankfully. But that's not to disparage New Yorkers. Right. But thank God I'm from New York.

I'm sorry. You started talking about dogs and my beagle ran in here. He's distracting me. I think he wants dinner. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for coming this was like legitimately really really fascinating um we i'm hoping to do this again we'll talk about when that might be maybe in two weeks is that feasible i don't know we'll figure it out yeah yeah yeah we'll figure

it out definitely do it again though yeah for sure all alright thank you guys so much all of you for contributing Ricochet join the conversation