Depending on where you live, the stores, parks, playgrounds, and offices in your area could be shut down for the rest of this summer. Or, they could all be open again right now. State governments have differing opinions on when the best time is to restart normal life (and the economy) even though public health experts are advising us all to continue to shelter in place until we’re fully equipped to test and care for every American who falls ill.
This week on Gadget Lab, we ask WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers how we would go about safely reopening the country. Then, a conversation about how we’re all coping with the coronavirus. (Mostly booze, but some other things too.)
Read more from Adam about the White Houses’ plans for easing social distancing measures, and about how state alliances here. Follow all of WIRED’s coronavirus coverage here. Read all you’d ever want to know about alcohol in Adam’s book Proof: The Science of Booze.
Adam recommends the book Forced Perspectives by Tim Powers. Lauren recommends the Showtime drama The Affair. Mike recommends the re-released Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World.
Adam Rogers can be found on Twitter @jetjocko. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Michael Calore: So I must say that the thing that has been really helping me do this podcast process is the "hide self view option" in Zoom.
Lauren Goode: That's amazing!
MC: Oh, yeah. It's important. It's like being in the real world.
[Intro theme music]
MC: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, a senior editor at WIRED. I am joined remotely again by my cohost, WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode.
LG: Hello from home.
MC: We are also joined this week by WIRED senior correspondent, Adam Rogers. Hi, Adam.
Adam Rogers: Hello, also from home.
MC: Welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be talking about the ways we as a nation are responding to the coronavirus. Later in the show, we will offer up some tips about how to cope emotionally at a time like this and yes, we will probably be offering some advice that doesn't involve booze, but only some. First, however, we're going to talk about nothing less than the state of the union. As shelter in place orders keep getting extended, the responses from state governments have varied widely. Some states have formed alliances so they can pool resources and fight the virus more effectively, while others have announced plans to reopen businesses and return to, quote unquote, "normal", which of course goes against the advice of public health experts.
On top of that, the federal government is eager to lift social distancing requirements without providing any guidelines on how exactly that would work. Now, Adam, about a week ago you wrote a piece for WIRED.com, in which you called the White House's plans for ending coronavirus restrictions "magical thinking." Seeing how a week feels like a month these days, how have things progressed since then?
AR: Isn't that time dilation effect strange? When you're not bounded by your commute to the office or whatever it is that you mark time with every time? Time gets funny. Things have progressed poorly, I would say. There's been this real weird schism between ... among, I guess, states which are the primary entities that regulate public health. Public health responsibilities fall on states and localities in the United States and the only levers that the federal government has really with public health or money, how much money to give, how much money you can grant to a state. So what's happening now is that the different states instituted their stay at home social distancing, non-pharmaceutical intervention orders at different times and now different states are feeling some pressure to lift them. That tracks roughly with which states are most dependent on sales tax as opposed to corporate taxes or property taxes.
I just saw some numbers on this. If you're really dependent on sales tax like Florida and Texas are, for example, then you really need businesses to reopen because you need that money coming back into your coffers. What you hope for is that the federal government might provide some kind of centralizing for all of this, and they haven't. At various times the president has either said, "This is entirely up to the states. I'm not going to help with ventilators and PPEs and you're all on your own," or, "Everybody should go back to work." In fact, the president tweeted some things about liberating different states and demanding that states lift whatever restrictions they had chosen.
The White House, the federal government, put out this sort of a guideline for when states could lift their restrictions, and this is the thing that I wrote about, but it said things like, "Okay, there's some gating factors and then there are these different phases you can do, but as soon as everybody has a lot of testing in place and as soon as you have contact tracing and sentinel surveillance, which is looking for a disease popping up, actively looking for it in different groups, then you can start to reopen." Everybody was like, "Okay, great, but we don't have that and the states have no way of having that." States say, "You just told us we had to go by our own tests, and then you got in our faces when we went and bought our own tests, and you're saying we have to have our own tests."
So they put this together and there was all kinds of confusion. Then the governor of the state of Georgia said, "We're just going to reopen on Friday and it's going to be fine. We're good." Now there's been some reporting that's come out that said the president and vice president, in a phone call, supported the governor. Then the president went onto one of these press briefings that have been this weird ongoing display of all of the things that have gone wrong here, and said, "Oh, I don't think they should reopen yet."
So the messages are worse than mixed. They are pureed, these messages. That's led to a lot of tension between the states and the federal government. That's always supposed to exist in a federal system. There's this cliche, the states are the laboratories of democracy. The states are supposed to come up with the innovations that then spread around, but now they're being told they're on their own, and that's led to a whole bunch of other very strange and almost science fiction sounding outcomes.
LG: Adam, there are also these alliances being formed right now, particularly the ones we saw between California, Washington and Oregon, and then there's this other faction on the East coast, East coast states that have basically said, "We're going to make some decisions together." I'm wondering how these kinds of alliances compare to other responses in times of crises and disasters, maybe ones that are not health related either. I mean, if we've ever seen this before with wildfires or hurricanes or geopolitical crises, or is this very specific to what has become essentially the partisan nature of COVID responses?
AR: Yeah, those are all exactly the right questions about these. So there's the Western States pact, that's California and Oregon and Washington. There's a Northeastern one that's the Tristate area plus some new England states. There's a Midwestern one that's not all of the Midwest and also comes with a couple of Southern States. Then depending on how you think about these things, there are a bunch of Southern states that don't have a formal alliance, but they've all said they're going to reopen really soon and they're not going to have the same social distancing. So in a way they constitute a fourth coalition, albeit a much looser coalition, and the coalitions that are more formal are supposed to do a couple of things. One is to get all the buying power of those states together to purchase things that they need, like personal protective equipment and ventilators.
Another one is to align the schedules or at least the principles behind the schedules for reopening, for loosening social distancing and stay at home orders and closure, stuff like that. The reason you want to do that, that makes a lot of sense because for example, Tristate area, how many people work in New York but live in Connecticut or in New Jersey? So the rules have to be the same or else if you reopen New York but not New Jersey, then you run the risk of spreading the disease around again. That's the thing that's really at stake here, is that almost everybody acknowledges that when you start to loosen the social distancing rules, you run a very, very high risk of ... in fact, it's almost certain that the disease comes back and some models show this happening in what one writer described as a shark tooth pattern.
It's a little bit more of these oscillating waves, two sine waves chasing each other. Disease comes, social distancing, disease gets tamped down. Social distancing gets released, the disease comes back and it kind of goes up and down like that. Maybe for years to come depending on how all this works and whether there's vaccines and drugs and all that stuff. So the question is what those regions are going to do because the states are the ones that had these local rules. Now are the regions going to share rules and then will different regions have different rules?
Now that's happened in public health a lot. You want regions to have shared public health ideas for things like drinking age, right? Because you don't want kids driving to the state border and buying booze and then driving back because then you have more drunk driving or the age of when people can buy cigarettes or how old they can be when they actually get a driver's license. All these things that have public health implications. There have been interstate alliances after disasters like point disasters. A hurricane happens and so people have to flee Houston and then they go to other states, or they flee the Gulf or people from Florida will flee north to other states.
But those tend to be very short lived. There are pretty good, maybe very good, back channel informal relationships among public health officials, among all kinds of state bureaucratic officials. That gives a disproportionate amount of power to larger states that have more heavily funded bureaucracy. So California and New York and Massachusetts all have really good big public health infrastructures. Washington does too. Also, probably not coincidentally, according to one of the researchers I talked to, these are all places with really good public health schools. People are getting masters of public health, doctorates of public health, PhDs in epidemiology, a lot of expertise in those places too.
Whereas Southern states like Mississippi for example, which is a place that one of the researchers I talked to studies very closely, have far fewer of those kinds of resources. So you end up with this regionalization of expertise as well. That ends up manifesting as this nominal blue state, red state divide. Many of these coalitions that are aligned together tend to be with democratic governors. That's the sort of thing that makes the Republican president nuts when that happens. In fact, now that there's an argument over how much money there's going to be in the various bills that come out of Congress to give aid, Mitch McConnell, the senate majority leader, said that he wouldn't ... he's calling this blue state benefits or that he won't give money to the blues to bail out the blue states. Which of course has meant that Californians and New Yorkers have said that their states pay a lot more money into the federal government. Kentucky, where Mitch McConnell's from, pulls a lot more money out, so who's really getting the bailout?
So it becomes this very political argument, which is one of the things that's been so catastrophic about this entire public health disaster, this ongoing public health disaster has been political from the get go. I think a lot of the scientific community, and certainly the science journalism community, has been sort of agog, wide-eyed at the idea that you can go to people and say there's a very dangerous disease, more deadly than anything people have seen in a long time, and we need to do something about it. And people have said like, "No because we're Republicans," or, "Yes, because we're Democrats," which is manifestly an insane response to a pandemic, but here we are.
MC: So a lot of these regional sort of rules that have been set for what it would look like for us to be able to reopen services and reopen retail establishments ... California had its rules last week, the federal government put out its own plan, which look a lot like California's plan. So everybody's following these same style of plans. All of them are threshold arguments, right? You can't reopen society until you have the ability to test X number of people. You have the ability to see a curve drop by X number, you have the ability to hospitalized X number of people. So given these thresholds, we're going to need to test absolutely everyone in order to find out if we've hit these numbers. So in the absence of testing, how do we know if we've hit these numbers and is there a way to measure those thresholds without testing everybody?
AR: Short answer is no. One of the weird things about the federal principles, the guidelines, were that they in fact did not have any thresholds. They said that states should have lower ... cases should be on a downward trend for two weeks, but you can be on a downward trend as soon as you get over the peak and still have a huge number of cases. New York seems to be ... New York State, New York City seems to be over its peak, but still has a tremendous number of cases, for example. Nobody really knows, as you point out, how many cases there are because there isn't that kind of testing. What's starting to happen now are population surveys, serosurveys, using the blood tests that are available now. There are many, many blood tests that are out there that look for antibodies, so for prior infection. People who aren't currently infected but to see who had it and how reliable those tests are is really in question right now.
There are a lot of statistical concerns about that, but what you might do is survey a sample of the population and then try to statistically ascertain what percentage of people in your population have already had it with a hope that you reach what's called herd immunity. That term's been getting bandied around a lot, but with the idea that enough people had it and recovered that then they're going to be immune. It's not totally sure that once you've had this, you are immune forever or for how long. Nobody has done that science either. That's in process and even the most ... I don't know whether to call these the most conservative or the most liberal interpretations of the math. It depends on how you think about these things. But like the one that came out of Santa Clara in California for example, were saying things like it might be as much as 40% or something.
Then that got really, really harshly criticized for I think important statistical and other reasons. But even that's not enough for herd immunity. Even the highest estimates so far don't get you there. So yeah, the balance that people are being asked to make is between economic benefit and lives lost. Realistically we make that determination in public policy all the time. That's implicit with many public policy decisions that are made in this country. But we're being asked to do it ... Policy makers and regulators are being asked to do it in the blind. There's no denominator for many of these decisions. They just don't know how many people are sick. They don't know how many people are well. They're not even sure how many people have died of the disease. At the same time they're being told, "Okay, but it's time for people to go back to work." It's untenable.
LG: Adam, we're running a little bit long in this segment, but I did want to ask you very quickly, what is your best prediction for what exactly is going to happen when the state of Georgia opens up some of these businesses, as the governor has said they're going to do this week. In fact, by the time people listen to this podcast will be Friday, April 24th or maybe later and they might've already happened. Gyms, barber shops, nail salons, other businesses may have opened up. What's going to happen?
AR: My prediction is they'll see a spike in cases, and I hope I'm wrong and there's some evidence that I will be. Nobody really understands why Florida hasn't seen as many cases as people expected. Nobody's sure where the models are right or wrong at this point. You can't be, right? So it'd be great if I and epidemiologists were wrong about this, that there's something that people don't understand about how the disease spreads. Maybe more people are infected and recovered. Maybe it doesn't spread as easily in certain populations as in others. A quarter of the people who've died according to official records, the counts really undercounted probably, in the United States so far were in congregate living, like nursing homes, elder care. So there's something about being in close quarters, where you're more exposed and it spreads more easily.
Immune systems in the elderly are weaker than in younger people and they seem to be more likely to get very sick and to die from this disease than other demographic groups. Maybe it will be that. So maybe the spike won't be as big, but it will be a significant spike in certain populations. These are vulnerable populations. Like every other catastrophe that happens in this country, people of color, people who are poor, people who are old, people who are homeless, people who have other illnesses, people who don't have insurance. They're the ones who are most hurt by this, and so even if the overall number is lower than people expect, certain populations are preferentially affected by it. I think that's what happens if you open too soon. That seems like what the evidence has already shown. I really, really hope I'm wrong. I hope that people can look back and say, "Wow, that was an overreaction. That guy didn't know what he was talking about."
MC: We're all hoping for that. All right, on that note, let's take a break and when we come back we're going to talk about how we are all coping. We'll be right back.
[Break]
MC: All right, welcome back. So over the last few weeks we have offered a lot of advice on this show about how to work from home without going insane and about how to manage your kids as a parent during the quarantine. But this has become a drawn out process with no real end in sight. So now we're going to talk about how we cope with all of it. The anxiety, the fear, the uncertainty, the sense of helplessness. Adam, let's do some shots.
LG: Adam, how are you dealing, aside from shots?
AR: I am taking a lot of walks with family. I like that, walking around the neighborhood. I'm fortunate to live in a pretty beautiful place in Beautiful Berkeley. And I, on the advice of my partner, downloaded a couple of completely visual puzzle games for my phone so I wasn't looking at words of any kind, much less about the coronavirus, so that's it before bed or maybe in front of the TV. There's a couple of binge-watch things that we're doing in the house and then those are the healthy ones that I'll admit to. The unhealthy ones we can talk about if you want.
LG: That seems like a good segue to talk about booze, Adam, since you literally wrote a book about this. So I was wondering how people should think about alcohol consumption right now. Some reports are suggesting that alcohol consumption is up. In fact, I was just reading one in the Charlotte Observer that suggested that more people are day drinking. At the same time the World Health Organization recommends that people limit their alcohol consumption right now, both because it's bad for your immune system and because it could lead to more risky behavior or even acts of violence. Then at the same time there are people who struggle with alcohol addiction and this time is probably particularly hard for them. Sheltering in place, being stuck at home and being inundated with people talking about alcohol. So what's your take on alcohol right now?
AR: Alcohol is a psychoactive chemical. It's mode of action, unlike almost every other psychoactive chemical that human beings like. It's not well understood by neuroscientists, which is pretty weird if you think about it. One of the only effects that it seems to have commonly consumed to access across cultures and across demographic groups is that it can make people more violent. You don't want that in close quarters. This is not a good thing to do in excess, like any other psychoactive chemical that any people consumed. It's not a good thing to do in excess. One of the things that professional booze people, bartenders and cocktail writers and stuff, who I came to really love in the course of doing my reporting, will do all this careful finesse and work to make sure that they're not overdoing it.
Then bartenders do have these problems there. There are whole groups designed to aid people who get into trouble with that sort of stuff. That said though, it does relax you. So in very stressful situations, this can be a thing, just not a lot of it. That's the thing to worry about, is if you're doing a lot of it, or if it's the only thing you're relying on or if you need it to go to get to normal, not to be better than or different than normal, but you need it to get to a baseline feeling of normalcy is one of the things that people would tell me is the time to worry about it.
LG: This funny thing happened, by the way, when I was reading the article I mentioned earlier that was published by CNBC about recommending that people limit their alcohol consumption. That same night as I was going to bed, this old article popped up in my news feed from The New York Times. It was from back in 2012. I don't know why it was resurfaced. Maybe it was some of those promoted tweets or something that you see from time to time and the article was one of the origins of this blue zone movement, which some of you might be familiar with. A couple of Nat Geo explorers tried to pinpoint some places around the world where people are known for their longevity and then they circled these places on the map with blue marker and started calling them the blue zones and they went and there were books about it, and so this article from 2012 that popped up in my feed was about people on the island of Ikaria in Greece who drank two to four glasses of wine per day or something like that and lived to be 107.
So it was just really funny that in my newsfeed there was something about, "Do not drink alcohol during the pandemic. It is bad," and then hours later I got sucked into this article again about people that make their own wine and drink a lot during the day end up living for a really long time.
AR: One of the things that spread distilled spirits through at least Europe was a plague. During one of the early rounds of actual plague, not this one, but actual plague, doctors had nothing to give people, but alcohol was one of the first chemicals that they had access to that actually had an effect. Not only did it ... you could feel it doing something, but you could also take all those herbs that monks had been growing in their garden and kind of macerate them or distill them and come up with something that seemed like it would have other medicinal effects as well. The drinks like Benedictine or chartreuse, these very herbal ... now they tend to be thought of as digestifs. They help the digestion, right? Those were these early distilled spirits that were medicinal to deal with exactly the kind of situation we have now.
I should say they didn't help. I don't know if that's good or bad. I think two things. First, I sent an email to a bartender and a writer about booze in Portland and Jeff Morgenthaler, who is credited with, I think rightly, credited with at least popularizing and making it possible for bars to bottle cocktails. One of his bars was the one of the first places to do that, at least popularly, and now a lot of bars are staying open in cities, are able to stay open by bottling cocktails and then you go up and line up and do them for pickup. I just did that last weekend. So trying to keep my locals in business by going and picking up whatever they're bottling and being able to have that so that they're going to be there when this is all over and we can all go back to sit in a bar and drink responsibly in that place. I've told Michael that's probably the first thing I'm going to go do.
Then the other thing too is I ... so I started doing that myself. I'll make a bottle of martinis and have that in the freezer as just a thing. I suppose that's my equivalent of making sourdough.
LG: Also, I like your magnanimous approach to drinking. You're like, "I'm helping to keep the local bars open so they're there when we all survive this."
AR: We're all in this together.
LG: Mike, what about you? What are your alcohol habits like?
MC: Well, the box of wine has been a big boon for me in the last month or two. Normally box wine gets a bad rap, but I've always been a strong proponent of it just because it's like ... it's what? Four bottles, right? Three liters of wine? About that usually, what you get in a box and you can drink a glass at a time or two glasses at a time or a glass and a half if you can drink that much. It's really great because it gives you health benefits of drinking red wine and it gives you a little bit of relaxing, but it's not overdoing it. It's very pleasant when you pair it with a nice meal. So it just feels like the civilized way to unwind the end of the day is to have a glass of wine from my box of wine.
But honestly, it's time to stop ragging on box wine. Get into it, especially for now when you should be limiting the number of trips that you make out of the house. It's a nice way to stock up for a few weeks at a time. Speaking of stocking up, I think the thing that's keeping me sane is a pretty strict routine. This is probably my A-type Capricorn showing right now, but I keep a pretty strict routine. Sunday is my day to do the weekly grocery trip where I get all of the vegetables and perishables and then I cook things for the week all day Sunday. So I'm in my kitchen for three hours every Sunday and that's what every Sunday looks like. Every Monday night there's a live stream that I watch, every Tuesday night there's a live stream that I watch. There's a live stream every day that my wife does where she does a drawing class, and having those things that you can sort of wake up and know that there's something on your calendar I think is really important right now.
Not only for yourself but also because it gives you a sense of community. It gives you something to look forward to. When I watch these live streams, I go on Twitter and I talk about them with the other thousand people that are watching them. Mostly concerts. Usually just live music fans who are missing live music, who all turn on Twitter and watch this and talk about the live music that they're watching. So the routine for me has been pretty significant as far as keeping me steady.
LG: That's important because as Adam said at the start of this show, when time gets really funny and all of the social constructs and activities that we did before to keep ourselves on schedule no longer exists, you have to find things that will, I don't know, make you feel like your life has some consistency or some pattern to it. I have found that I don't set an alarm in the mornings anymore, which is so weird.
AR: Wow.
LG: Yeah, I mean I used to be tied to train schedules and things like that, so I would set an alarm and I was a very early riser for a long time and now I'm like, "Screw the alarm," and I'm still waking up at seven most times, sometimes a little bit earlier, sometimes closer to 06:30 so I'm still up early and I'm still getting up then for the most part too. I'm not rolling over and sleeping in, but there's something about having the lack of an alarm that just eliminates a little bit of stress in some strange way. You would think it would cause more stress. Like, "Oh no, I'm going to oversleep," but it doesn't because I haven't overslept at all. So I just get up now.
MC: It's easier when the sun is coming up a little bit earlier in the morning.
LG: Yeah, and also I'm sure for some people if you have pets and kids and all these other things that don't give you a choice in the matter, that certainly makes a difference as well.
AR: It definitely undermines your authority as a parent, though. I'll tell you, going into the kids' room this morning, it happened again, being like, "All right, time to get up". They were like, "Why?" You sort of stand there, like, "Well ..." Okay. [Laughs]
MC: "I need you to get up and go to the store and buy me a box of wine. Here's a $20 bill." All right, well let's take a break and when we come back we'll do our recommendations for what we're consuming and loving.
[Break]
MC: All right, welcome back. Here's the last part of the show where we do our recommendations. Adam, you are our guest. You go first.
AR: All right, well, so a favorite writer of mine has just come out with a new book. It's a writer named Tim Powers who was a student of Philip K. Dick, and who writes secret history, urban fantasy weirdness. I've loved him my entire life. So he has a book called Forced Perspectives, which is a sequel to his last one which was called Alternate Routes. They take place in Los Angeles that's also secretly populated with ghosts and the people who want to exploit those ghosts. I'm reading this at the same time as I am reading to my 10 year old, one of his first books that he wrote in 1979 called The Drawing of the Dark. So I'm reading these bracketed ... because I read it when I was about 10 probably. So I'm reading both at the same time, one to my kid, and his new one to me. So it feels very circular and comforting and he's a wonderful writer and I love it.
MC: Nice. Lauren, what's yours?
LG: My recommendation is a show called The Affair. It's been around for a while. It first started airing in 2014 and Mike tells me the season finale was just a few months ago, wasn't that long ago so I'm not too far behind. But I started watching this before the pandemic and then I dropped off it for a little while and now I picked it up again. It's on Showtime and it's about an affair, as you might imagine. It's co-created by Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi, or Levi might be how you pronounce that. It's about a married man, married with four kids, who meets a woman, a waitress at a diner, and they embark on an affair and all of the things that happen as a result of that. But what I like about the show is that each episode is broken down into two different perspectives from different characters, and some cases there might even be three perspectives from characters as the show gets more mature.
It's produced in such a creative way that you can see how different people's perspectives and interpretations of events and recollections of dialogue and even recollections around what people look like and what they're wearing during a certain situation, how each character perceives things differently. That becomes the structural ... the narrative backbone throughout the program. I will say season four is utterly ridiculous. I almost fell off after getting into season four and I kept saying to Mike, my cohost here, "It's so bad. Season four is so bad, it's so weird." And he said, "You have to stick it out. Wait for season five." So now I'm in season five and I'm not quite done with it. I think I have about three episodes to go, but I mean I've made it through five seasons almost of this program, so I think at this point I can recommend it.
MC: I'm so glad you like the show. It's one of my favorite dramas that's ever been on television. The thing that you highlighted about it, where you see the story from different perspectives, it is like a textbook example of the unreliable narrator. I absolutely love stories that do that because it's really subtle. They don't really try to mash it down your throat, and that subtlety just gives it this sort of lightness where you can watch it for the horny shenanigans or you can watch it for the novelistic writer release stuff, and it works on both levels. I really just love that show. Great acting and a lot of backstage drama.
LG: There's a lot of drama. Also, as with most content that we're watching these days, it was produced long before the pandemic so I've had this visceral reaction to things sometimes now where I'm like, "Oh God, you're making out with somebody random who you met in a bar. Don't do that. That's a terrible idea." It's like future me talking back to you. "Don't do that. Wash your hands."
MC: Okay. So my recommendation is, as Arielle Pardes would say, on-brand for me. It is a five hour movie called Until the End of the World. It came out about 30 years ago in 1991, 1992. It's by the German director of Wim Wenders. That's two Ws, Wim Wenders, but you pronounce it Vim Vendors, if you're a pretentious movie person like me. It's like four hours and 50 minutes and it is about a worldwide disaster that changes society and forces everybody to go into isolation and question their place in the world, which is oddly prescient right now. But that's not the reason to watch it. The reason to watch it is because this is a beautiful 4k restoration of this movie, which a lot of people consider to be a lost classic because when it came out, the distribution company in the 90s said, "There's no way we can put a five hour movie out in movie theaters. You need to make a two and a half hour cut of this so that we can make something commercial that actually like earns a dollar."
So they did that. I saw that version on VHS in the '90s and was not super impressed. So when the five hour cut was released in December of last year on The Criterion Collection, I put it in my queue and I finally got around to watching it. I watched it in two halves, which is perfectly reasonable and I would highly recommend it. Look up online when the intermission was in the theatrical release and that's where you can pause it and finish it the next day. So if you have The Criterion channel, it's there. If you don't have The Criterion channel, you can order the blue Ray or the DVD and check it out. Until the End of the World by Wim Wenders. The soundtrack, as a bonus, is insanely good.
AR: Did you ever go to a movie that had an intermission? Have either you've been to that?
MC: Yeah, a few.
LG: I don't know. I don't remember. That was in the before times, Adam. I don't remember much from then.
AR: For me, it's one of those definingly civilized things. You knew that like, "Oh, it has an overture and an intermission." Felt like going to a ... Lawrence of Arabia, one of the Lawrence of Arabia re-releases.
MC: Yes, that one. Also, 2001, the 70 millimeter print shipped with an intermission, and Seven Samurai.
AR: Oh, that's a good one.
MC: Yeah, Seven Samurai.
AR: So basically it's like four samurai and then the intermission and then three samurai.
MC: I won't spoil anything, but that's not what happens.
[Laughter]
MC: Oh, all right. Well, I'm glad we ended on a high note. Thank you everybody for listening and thanks to Adam for joining us.
AR: My pleasure. Always happy to do it.
MC: If you have any feedback, you can find us all on Twitter. Just check the show notes. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth and our executive producer is Alex Kapelman. Goodbye, and we'll be back next week.
[Outro theme music]
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