4.6 • 832 Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2020
⏱️ 47 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hi, James. Ben, how are you? |
0:02.5 | You know, it's interesting. I wanted to say that I'm scared because we are recording this on a Thursday morning here, Wednesday night in the U.S., and basically, from what I can tell, being in Taiwan and mostly looking at Twitter, over the last three to four hours or so, the attitude and posture of America has sort of flipped completely |
0:22.3 | on its head. Yes. Tom Hanks has coronavirus. The NBA suspended. Donald Trump gave a speech. |
0:28.1 | We'll just leave it at that. How does it feel there? It's kind of surreal. It's been a little bit, |
0:34.6 | it's definitely accelerated with those events that you just described over |
0:38.2 | the last few hours, but San Francisco for folks who aren't in the States, and I'm sure it's |
0:43.1 | like this in a number of other cities, it started to turn into a ghost town. It was very |
0:48.8 | noticeable this week. A number of companies started switching to work from home. I was talking to one of my colleagues on Tuesday morning who normally commutes quite a way. |
0:58.0 | It's normally a 75 minute commute. |
1:00.0 | He did it in 45 minutes and people just aren't coming to work. |
1:05.0 | They're all working from home. |
1:07.0 | It's got this eerie ghost town feel to it. |
1:09.0 | I'm sure San Francisco is far from alone in that. |
1:12.9 | It's not at the point of some of the pictures that you were seeing out of China where the streets |
1:17.7 | were literally completely abandoned and there were no cars on the road at all. But it's certainly |
1:22.5 | moved a lot closer to that direction. It's an interesting point. When I said at the beginning, |
1:26.5 | I want to say scared, I feel it's weird for me because |
1:30.3 | America seems to be going through what I went through like six or seven weeks ago. |
1:34.3 | And in part that's just because by virtue of being in Taiwan. |
1:37.3 | And, you know, I think Taiwan reacted to this very, very early. |
1:40.3 | You know, the government was screening people from Wuhan back in December when there was |
1:45.1 | still, you know, doctors were still being arrested for talking about this just because there was |
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