o be controlled, where normal life is messy, right? But if it's designed to be controlled, maybe they can do it better than your normal messy life. Right? That's what I think.

So I don't have a feeling of whether we can tell that closing businesses helps or hurts. So we don't have science, because it's hard to measure and it's kind of too early to even know if you did. So what do you do? You don't have science, but common sense kind of can point in both directions, can it? You could make a case that social distancing would be better served with business closures, but then how do you factor in the fact that it wouldn't be normal business? It would be opened under certain careful restrictions. Would that make it safer than normal life? It might. Who knows?

So I would say business closures are unproven scientifically. And so there you should really pause to see if you want to do that, because we know the cost of it could be gigantic in terms of extra poverty and all the things that that causes.

But I say the opposite or something very different about masks. And people have pointed out that looks like an inconsistency. Why is it that I say I can't make a determination about whether closing businesses make sense, but my common sense of it, which is largely an illusion, common sense is an illusion, but my feeling of it, having observed it up close, my feeling of it is it's a mistake to close businesses. There might be some exceptions, like possibly a gym, but no, even a gym, they would do good procedures. So I would say anybody who is willing to open up and do careful procedures, my logical, just experienced brain that sees the world says probably opening businesses would be a better way forward.

And California is starting to open up a little bit starting this week, so that's good. But I don't say that with masks.

Now masks also have this problem that we don't know exactly what masks are doing in the context of the coronavirus. We know they've been measured in different contexts for different purposes in the past. We know that the experts overwhelmingly say you should use masks. We know that other people point to other studies and say no, these studies show masks don't make a difference.

So why is it that I would have a different opinion about masks, in which I say you should go ahead and wear them, take the recommendation of the experts, whereas the business opening stuff I'm a little squishier on, and it looks like maybe we should just open the businesses and not do that? Why do I make that difference?

And the difference is this. Here at first some context. You live in a life in a world in which you don't have scientific studies for almost anything you do. You don't know that waking up a little early will make your life better or worse. You don't know that this meal you ate is the smart one or not smart one. You don't know much about anything. You don't know the house you might buy, the job you might take, the commute you choose. Almost everything you're doing all day long is stuff that nobody studied. You've just lived in the world long enough where you say, I think this looks like a better choice than this, but there's no way to know. You just got to take your shot.

Masks are a little like that. And there's a rule that I use that I apply to just about everything, which is that friction pretty much always works. Now I'll leave a little wiggle room because I'm sure there's some case where it doesn't. But if you've lived long enough you see that wherever friction is applied or wherever it's removed, it has exactly the predictable impact. If you tax something, people will do less of it. If you build a wall, it'll be harder for people to get over it. Won't stop it, but it'll be harder, might reduce it. If you restrict anything, you get less of it.

And with my living in the world without the science, just living in the world, I say hey, if the problem is stuff shooting into your mouth, and we know that that's far bigger problem than what you're touching, that seems to be the common understanding, if it's stuff that's shooting out of your mouth and you can put some friction on that thing, does it stop every bit of the virus? No, no we know it doesn't stop all of the virus. But we do know that the amount of the viral load makes a big difference in what the outcomes are.

So as long as we know that the degree of viral load makes a big difference, and common sense and living in the world says well this mask probably limits some of that, does it stop all of it? No. Nobody thinks that. Nobody thinks a mask stops a virus. Nobody thinks that. There's no expert who thinks that. They think it might slow it down, might add a little friction.

Now do you need to do a scientific study in every situation in your life in which somebody's applying or taking away friction to know what kind of effect that will have? You would be right 99 percent of the time if you just said that friction is a real thing and wherever it is added you get less of a thing, wherever it's subtracted you get more of a thing. That's it.

Now could I be completely wrong? Could we learn someday in the future that masking was more bad than good? Absolutely you could totally learn that. So if you think I'm telling you I know with my great brain certainty 100 percent that masks are definitely the reason, I don't think that's knowable. And anybody who has that opinion I would respect that.

But I do think that if you're doing a risk management assessment, given how high the stakes are, I would say it's a good risk. And that the consensus of experts is still solidly pro-mask. If you see a growing number of experts who tell you masks don't work, I would take that seriously. But right now I don't see that. I see people who are not experts looking at studies they don't understand, which are usually on slightly different things, you know, whether it works in a surgery setting, etc., for different kinds of diseases.

I would wait for a pretty big consensus of experts to say they don't work before I would even consider that they don't work. And we don't have anything like that. Now if you've seen actual medical experts, a consensus, not a rando doctor person, but actual growing consensus of doctors saying masks don't do anything, I would take that seriously. But that doesn't exist.

And you got to ask yourself why, right? Because there are people on every side of everything. You don't have enough doctors to form sort of a movement away from masks. You don't. That means something. You should take that seriously.

Now does that mean the experts are right? No. But since it matches with my common sense, if you want to call it that, it's always an illusion, then I'm willing to take that as a reasonable risk to wear the masks.

Here's the funniest, scariest thing in the world. There's some reporting that Trump is getting stronger by being out of the news. I think everybody has made the same observation that Trump, if he just stopped talking for a while as president, if he had just stopped talking for a while, that his popularity would have gone through the roof if he just stopped being a little bit as Trumpy as he is. Now that's a ridiculous thing to hope for, because the whole point of electing Trump is that he wasn't going to change. He wouldn't have even been elected in the first place if people thought he was going to be a different person when he took office, right? That's part of what you expected, that Trump is Trump.

That said, he sort of involuntarily forced into some silence after his term ended. And the less he talks, I feel like the more popular he's going to get, because you've got this big populist energy, if you will, that suddenly became leaderless. What happens when you have this much energy, let's say the populist, whatever the Trump movement was, you have that much energy and then the leader goes silent? What happens? Does the energy just dissipate? Well I guess the people on the left hoped that would happen. Does it transfer to another leader? It could. But who is that? Don't you think we'd know by now who is the natural inheritor of the energy that the Trump movement or the populist movement created? I don't know.

I mean there are some good Republican candidates for 2024. Some of them more Trump-like than others. But there's not really a natural, you know, there's not a name where everyone of you would say, well what about X? Not really, right? Yeah, Matt Gaetz I think is his own person. I don't see him as exactly a Trump clone. But he would be at least in terms of the populist policies would be very close to that. So yeah, Ted Cruz has some problems politically at the moment because he's being branded as being part of the insurrection.

So here's the interesting part. If you thought that Trump was a problem before, the Democrats decide to