The Big Nap: Coronavirus and World War II - Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | Do you see a connection between World War II and the crisis we're living through right
00:00:06.080 | now?
00:00:07.080 | Sure.
00:00:08.080 | The need for collective action, reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these abstractions
00:00:14.600 | like everyone should just do exactly what he or she wants to do for himself and leave
00:00:20.320 | everyone else alone.
00:00:21.320 | None of these abstractions work in a global crisis.
00:00:25.320 | And this is just a reminder that we didn't somehow put all that behind us.
00:00:30.120 | When I hear stories about my grandfather who was in the army, and so the Soviet Union where
00:00:35.140 | most people die when you're in the army, there's a brotherhood that happens, there's a love
00:00:39.760 | that happens.
00:00:40.760 | Do you think that's something we're going to see here?
00:00:43.200 | A sense of community?
00:00:44.200 | Well, we're not there.
00:00:45.200 | I mean, what the Soviet Union went through.
00:00:47.600 | I mean, the enormity of the war on the Russian doorstep, this is different.
00:00:56.360 | What we're going through now is not...
00:00:57.880 | We can't talk about Stalingrad and COVID in the same breath yet.
00:01:01.120 | We're not ready.
00:01:02.440 | And the sort of, you know, the sense of like the great patriotic war and the way in which
00:01:10.280 | I was very moved by the Soviet custom of newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their
00:01:15.580 | wedding day.
00:01:16.580 | And on the happiest day of your life, you have to say thank you to the people who made
00:01:19.280 | it possible.
00:01:20.820 | We're not there.
00:01:22.260 | We're just restarting history.
00:01:26.560 | I've called this, on the Rogan program, I called it the great nap.
00:01:30.280 | The 75 years with very little by historical standards in terms of really profound disruptions.
00:01:39.260 | And so-
00:01:40.260 | When you call it the great nap, you mean lack of deep global tragedy?
00:01:44.280 | Well, lack of realized global tragedy.
00:01:47.680 | So I think that the development, for example, of the hydrogen bomb, you know, was something
00:01:52.360 | that happened during the great nap.
00:01:56.320 | And that doesn't mean that people who lived during that time didn't feel fear, didn't
00:02:02.320 | know anxiety, but it was to say that most of the violent potential of the human species
00:02:07.580 | was not realized.
00:02:09.040 | It was in the form of potential energy.
00:02:11.240 | And this is the thing that I've sort of taken issue with, with the description of Steven
00:02:15.600 | Pinker's optimism, is that if you look at the realized kinetic variables, things have
00:02:20.120 | been getting much better for a long time, which is the great nap.
00:02:23.840 | But it's not as if our fragility has not grown, our dependence on electronic systems, our
00:02:29.880 | vulnerability to disruption.
00:02:32.380 | And so all sorts of things have gotten much better.
00:02:35.940 | Other things have gotten much worse, and the destructive potential has skyrocketed.
00:02:40.760 | Is tragedy the only way we wake up from the big nap?
00:02:44.880 | Well, no, you could also have jubilation about positive things, but it's harder to get people's
00:02:51.760 | attention.
00:02:52.760 | Can you give an example of a big global positive thing that could happen?
00:02:56.520 | I think that when, for example, just historically speaking, HIV went from being a death sentence
00:03:03.240 | to something that people could live with for a very long period of time, it would be great
00:03:08.120 | if that had happened on a Wednesday.
00:03:10.600 | Like all at once, you knew that things had changed.
00:03:13.680 | And so the bleed in somewhat kills the sort of the Wednesday effect, where it all happens
00:03:19.040 | on a particular day at a particular moment.
00:03:22.880 | I think if you look at the stock market here, there's a very clear moment where you can
00:03:26.920 | see that the market absorbs the idea of the coronavirus.
00:03:31.120 | I think that with respect to positives, the moon landing was the best example of a positive
00:03:38.720 | that happened at a particular time.
00:03:41.080 | Or recapitulating the Soviet American link up in terms of Skylab and Soyuz, that was
00:03:51.440 | a huge moment when you actually had these two nations connecting in orbit.
00:03:58.480 | And so yeah, there are great moments where something beautiful and wonderful and amazing
00:04:02.680 | happens.
00:04:04.200 | But it's just there are fewer of them.
00:04:06.280 | That's why as much as I can't imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event, when you
00:04:11.920 | have like 30,000 people waiting and she says yes, it's pretty exciting.
00:04:18.400 | So I think that we shouldn't discount that.
00:04:22.480 | So how bad do you think it's going to get in terms of the global suffering that we're
00:04:28.560 | going to experience with this crisis?
00:04:31.600 | I can't figure this one out.
00:04:33.320 | I'm just not smart enough.
00:04:34.680 | Something is going weirdly wrong.
00:04:37.120 | They're almost like two separate storylines.
00:04:39.640 | In one storyline, we aren't taking things nearly seriously enough.
00:04:45.480 | We see people using food packaging lids as masks who are doctors or nurses.
00:04:54.560 | We hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to triage.
00:05:00.240 | And that's a very terrifying story.
00:05:03.560 | On the other hand, there's this other story which says there are tons of ventilators someplace.
00:05:09.160 | We've got lots of masks, but they haven't been released.
00:05:12.840 | We've got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used.
00:05:17.000 | And it's very confusing to me that somehow these two stories give me the feeling that
00:05:23.320 | they both must be true simultaneously, and they can't both be true in any kind of standard
00:05:28.360 | way.
00:05:29.360 | I don't know whether it's just that I'm dumb, but I can't get one or the other story to
00:05:33.720 | quiet down.
00:05:34.720 | So I think weirdly, this is much more serious than we had understood it.
00:05:38.960 | And it's not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be at the same time,
00:05:44.800 | and that we're not being given the tools to actually understand, oh, here's how to interpret
00:05:49.540 | the data, or here's the issue with the personal protective equipment is actually a jurisdictional
00:05:54.980 | battle or a question of who pays for it rather than a question of whether it's present or
00:05:59.800 | absent.
00:06:00.800 | I don't understand the details of it, but something is wildly off in our ability to
00:06:04.720 | understand where we are.
00:06:06.160 | - So that's policy, that's institutions.
00:06:08.760 | What about, do you think about the quiet suffering of millions of people that have lost their
00:06:14.800 | job?
00:06:15.800 | Is this a temporary thing?
00:06:17.360 | I mean, what I'm, my ear's not to the suffering of those people who have lost their job or
00:06:24.000 | the 50% possibly of small businesses that are gonna go bankrupt.
00:06:28.280 | Do you think about that quiet suffering?
00:06:32.040 | Well and how that might arise itself?
00:06:34.520 | - Could be not quiet too.
00:06:36.240 | I mean, it could be a depression.
00:06:39.080 | This could go from recession to depression and depression could go to armed conflict
00:06:43.320 | and then to war.
00:06:44.320 | So it's not a very abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where we can begin with
00:06:52.320 | quiet suffering and anxiety and all of these sorts of things and people losing their jobs
00:06:57.480 | and people dying from stress and all sorts of things.
00:07:01.480 | But look, anything powerful enough to put us all indoors in a, I mean, think about this
00:07:10.360 | as an incredible experiment.
00:07:13.520 | Imagine that you proposed, hey, I wanna do a bunch of research.
00:07:17.560 | Let's figure out what changes in our emissions profiles for our carbon footprints when we're
00:07:23.320 | all indoors or what happens to traffic patterns or what happens to the vulnerability of retail
00:07:28.880 | sales as Amazon gets stronger, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:35.000 | I believe that in many of those situations, we're running an incredible experiment.
00:07:41.600 | And am I worried for us all?
00:07:43.680 | Yes.
00:07:44.680 | There are bright spots, one of which is that when you're ordered to stay indoors, people
00:07:49.320 | are gonna feel entitled.
00:07:50.320 | And the usual thing that people are going to hit when they hear that they've lost your
00:07:55.440 | job, there's this kind of tough love attitude that you see, particularly in the United States.
00:08:06.040 | Like, oh, you lost your job, poor baby.
00:08:08.600 | Well, go retrain, get another one.
00:08:11.120 | I think there's gonna be a lot less appetite for that because we've been asked to sacrifice,
00:08:17.240 | to risk, to act collectively.
00:08:20.080 | And that's the interesting thing.
00:08:21.760 | What does that reawaken in us?
00:08:23.500 | Maybe the idea that we actually are nations and that your fellow countrymen may start
00:08:29.200 | to mean something to more people.
00:08:31.520 | It certainly means something to people in the military.
00:08:34.440 | But I wonder how many people who aren't in the military start to think about this as
00:08:38.720 | like, oh yeah, we are kind of running separate experiments and we are not China.
00:08:44.840 | So you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come?
00:08:48.720 | From my perspective, we are a part of the experiment, but I don't feel like we have
00:08:54.040 | access to the full data, the full data of the experiment.
00:08:57.880 | We're just like little mice in a large...
00:09:01.480 | Does this one make sense to you, Lex?
00:09:04.760 | I'm romanticizing it and I keep connecting it to World War II.
00:09:08.180 | So I keep connecting to historical events and making sense of them through that way
00:09:12.480 | or reading The Plague by Camus.
00:09:16.200 | Like almost kind of telling narratives and stories, but I'm not hearing the suffering
00:09:25.480 | that people are going through because I think that's quiet.
00:09:29.800 | Everybody's numb currently.
00:09:32.420 | They're not realizing what it means to have lost your job and to have lost your business.
00:09:37.320 | There's kind of a...
00:09:40.480 | I'm afraid how that fear will materialize itself once the numbness wears out.
00:09:49.400 | And especially if this lasts for many months, and if it's connected to the incompetence
00:09:54.960 | of the CDC and the WHO and our government and perhaps the election process.
00:10:03.440 | My biggest fear is that the elections get delayed or something like that.
00:10:08.960 | So the basic mechanisms of our democracy get slowed or damaged in some way that then mixes
00:10:18.440 | with the fear that people have that turns to panic, that turns to anger, that anger.
00:10:23.400 | - Can I just play with that for a little bit?
00:10:26.360 | - Sure.
00:10:27.520 | - If in fact all of that structure that you grew up thinking about, and again, you grew
00:10:34.000 | up in two places, right?
00:10:36.200 | So when you were inside the US, we tend to look at all of these things as museum pieces.
00:10:43.720 | Like how often do we amend the constitution anymore?
00:10:47.680 | And in some sense, if you think about the Jewish tradition of Simchat Torah, you've
00:10:52.280 | got this beautiful scroll that has been lovingly hand drawn in calligraphy that's very valuable.
00:11:02.000 | And it's very important that you not treat it as a relic to be revered.
00:11:08.960 | And so we, one day a year, we dance with the Torah and we hold this incredibly vulnerable
00:11:14.340 | document up and we treat it as if it was Ginger Rogers being led by Fred Astaire.
00:11:21.920 | Well, that is how you become part of your country.
00:11:26.880 | In fact, maybe the election will be delayed, maybe extraordinary powers will be used, maybe
00:11:32.800 | any one of a number of things will indicate that you're actually living through history.
00:11:37.200 | This isn't a museum piece that you were handed by your great-great-grandparents.
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00:11:59.140 | you