This is the audio version of my YouTube improv (see below) as there have been some problems with that video buffering.

Transcript of first 15 mins or so (more to come possibly):

This is a sharing of observations about the situation. I could say the global situation but I'm not able to observe the global situation, I'm only able to observe a local situation in a small town called Hope. I thought I could use this as a microcosm. I have the Hope Standard  here and this is one of the things that prompted me to want to really go on record about this, because the cognitive dissonance becomes quite intense when I look at what the mainstream media's reporting in my town. This is just a local rag that I've even appeared in, and written a letter for, and anyone can get into the Hope Standard, although probably not currently, and certainly I don't imagine that something I might have to say about the situation would make it in there. It seems to me that, whatever's going on globally, the best but possibly the only way for us as individuals to try and get to grips with it is by taking a blood sample, a holographic fragment of the collective planetary experience, and analyzing that.

We have a pretty rich opportunity for doing that because we are running a local business, a thrift store that my wife and I own and currently we are the only people who run it. We had three staff members and two of them were encouraging us to close so rather than close we reduced our hours and laid off our staff and said we'll take the risks, we'll take the hits, we'll man the ship in this crisis in this storm.

So we've reduced the hours and the days, from seven days a week 9:30 to 5:00 p.m. to 5 days a week 11:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. What we've discovered is the profits have not reduced; there was a rocky patch for about a week where it seemed like it was pretty bad but it was still worth staying open. And since that time I'd say our sales have gone back to normal, even if you don't adjust them for the reduced hours, as in we're making the same in a shorter day, more or less on average, as we were with a longer day. To me this suggests that things are evening out; people are adapting to the changed hours and shopping in a more condensed time. Perhaps because all the other shops, including thrift shops, are closed, we're picking up some of the slack, although I don't really notice many new customers. And many of the shops in town are not open, so people who just want to have a shopping experience and interact with people have the opportunity to do so.

At the thrift store they have an unusual opportunity for interacting because we're not imposing any kind of social distancing and I've noticed that customers aren't really observing it either and we could care less frankly. In the supermarkets, I’ve noticed that there's a certain amount of tension between the customers and the checkout people, nothing major but still, it's there. So our thrift store is acting as something of a hub of sanity, though others might say irresponsibility, but so far nobody has, and this is one of the sources of cognitive dissonance for me: how come we're not getting a lot of flack for staying open and for not particularly observing the rules and for not taking the coronavirus seriously?

And we've been able to observe by talking to our customers what the general view is: if we ask a customer first of all: do you know anyone who's got sick. there seems to be a general “No,” with a few qualifications. And then with a little probing, how seriously you take this, or what do you think is going on, it's almost unanimous that our customers believe that this whole thing is exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated, and that something else is going on entirely. Almost all of our customers do not believe the mainstream accounts, the numbers; they do not believe that we're involved in a pandemic.