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Episode 183 — A Search for Everything

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Ben Thompson / James Allworth

Technology

4.6832 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ben and James contrast U.S. and China’s response to the coronavirus, and the choices facing society about how to handle information. Links Ben Thompson: Apple’s Earnings, Slowing Services Growth, Apple and the Coronavirus — Stratechery Ben Thompson: Economic Power in the Age of Abundance — Stratechery Ben Thompson: The Corona Virus Whistleblowers; NBA Salary Cap Decreases; Apple, Benefits, and Risks — Stratechery Ben Thompson: Disney and COVID-19, The Coronavirus IPO, In Defense of Twitter — Stratechery Ben Thompson: Zero Trust Information — Stratechery Ben Thompson: The Internet and the Third Estate — Stratechery Hosts Ben Thompson, @benthompson, Stratechery James Allworth, … Continue reading Episode 183 — A Search for Everything

Transcript

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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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