Angry Planet - Dealing With Our COVID Fear and Panic

Episode Date: March 21, 2020

This week we're taking a moment to work through our fear, panic, and axiety.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. That was one of the themes that I kept coming back to, which is that like, panic is potentially as big of a problem as the actual disease itself. And I guess I was kind of telling myself that. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts.

Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. Normally, I have a written intro here up at the top. We're kind of go down points, but we're living in odd times. And I decided I kind of wanted to speak off the cuff to you, the listeners. As I'm sure, all of you are aware, we're in the middle of a pan. actually probably more likely at the beginning of a pandemic. By the time you hear this, don't know how bad or how much better things could get.

One thing I do know is that a couple times in our life, we are going to live through moments of great change. And I think we are in the middle of one of those, or again, at the beginning of one of those now. And a lot of us don't know what's going to happen, including stupid podcasters. There are smart people that think they know a little bit about what's going to happen, but there's so many variables and so unknowns with this thing that, you know, we don't know what our life is going to be like in a year and how it's going to have changed. But I know that we'll get through it because we tend to get through these things. And here to help us work through some of that panic and some of that fear is Mike Pearl.

Pearl is a journalist whose work has appeared in vice, the outline, the all, and the Hollywood reporter. He's also the author of the book, The Day It Finally Happens, Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, and Other Possible Phenomena. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So the reason I wanted to have you on the show, we talked to roughly about six months ago, right when the book first came out. And now it finally happened, Mike. One of the situations in the book finally happened, yeah. One of the situations in the book finally happened.

I reread that portion earlier today. It's not quite a one-to-one. Thank you for noticing that. A lot of people are like, this is just like what's in your book. And I was like, did you read it? Did you actually read it? No, so in your book, the situation that you outline is the day the antibiotics stopped working. Right.

And you gave it a five out of five chance. And again, we're obviously dealing with a virus and not a, not bacteria, but it's similar. The situation you kind of set up and the conversations you have are, there's parallels here. Can you kind of talk about those a little bit? Yeah. So when I wrote that chapter, you know, what I was trying to capture was a little bit different. It was it was the idea that it was very different. It was focused on the idea of bacteria becoming immune to our antibiotics.

And so it was really about superbugs, and that is not what this is. This is just a regular old virus. And so when I wrote that, it was also my excuse to write about a pandemic. So I did. The fictional section at the beginning of the chapter touches on you know, economic collapse and borders being shut down and all of the cool stuff that happens in, you know, all of the, in all of our favorite pandemic fiction. But I didn't go into things like social distancing. I mean, like maybe a tiny bit.

I talk about how we are, we are now a lot more familiar than. we once were, you know, during, say, the time of the plague, the black plague, we're familiar with the basic methods of, you know, not acquiring a pathogen, like not stealing the clothes of people who've just died from the actual effects of the pathogen because that will likely also kill you. Like, we know things like that. And they once did not know things like that. And that makes a huge difference when it comes to this stuff.

And, you know, by the time of the Spanish flu, they also knew that. So we're not really, we're not really that much, in a lot of ways, we're not really that much further along than the Spanish flu. But because of that difference, because of the difference between bacteria and viruses, and that chapter really, really was focused on bacteria. I kind of am kicking myself that I didn't do, that I didn't find a way to work in another, another pathogen chapter because, you know, it's, it was, it was just right there. And it was, and that's because the research that I did for that chapter was the sort of like, the, the brief, the brief flirtation that I had with writing a chapter on zombies. I was going to like, I was going to sort of do a bait and switch and be like, what I'm actually writing about is a virus. And then I didn't end up, I didn't even get very far into that. But so what we're living through now, according to the logic of my book, is my version of a zombie apocalypse.

So here we are in the zombie apocalypse. Doesn't feel very fun. There sure are a lot of good TikToks, though, right? Well, I mean, this is really a time for a time for the regular old reporters to shine and for the for the like long read writers and the think piece writers to kind of fade into the background and for the old fashioned just going in and telling you the facts reporters to just to just blow them out of the water. I, you know, it's great. I'm going to share more opinions on this show than I normally do on a typical episode of War College. Again, we're in strange times. Listener, thank you for indulging us.

Op-ed writers, I think, too, probably need to get less traction right now. Yep. Right? It is not your moment. Yeah. No, it's not. And that's a cross-political spectrum, in my opinion. People need to sit down and shut up and, again, let people that do actual decent just-the-facts reporting to kind of come out and shine.

And that's part of what's going to help us get through this. Good journalism. Yeah. Which is something that personally I'm worried about in my field at the moment. Everything's kind of okay right now. But again, this thing is going to have ripples throughout the entire economy. And we don't know what's going to happen. We just don't.

And I think that fear of the unknown is a big part of what I'm grappling with. And again, one of the reasons I want to talk to you is that I remember in our last conversation, you told me that kind of one of the reasons that you started doing this kind of work and researching these kinds of topics and wrote this book is because when you face a fear and you learn about it, it helps you manage it. And I'm wondering how you're managing your fear at this moment. Um, so not, the answer is not well, uh, I mean, how do, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, I think that's probably a 10 or however you measure it, like, where, where, where are you? Um, I'm a fairly anxious person, but I, eight, I'm going to say an eight. Yeah. I think that's probably about where I am. I mean, I'm feeling a lot of new emotions, like, I'm somebody who tries to downplay the idea that the minute, like, the shit hits the fan will all just kill each other for the last sandwich or whatever.

I don't, I don't really, like, I haven't, I have not really observed that to be true in, in actual scholarship on crisis situations. it seems like there's more of a sense of coming together. But when I'm out at the grocery store, I like, and I just, I want a bag of rice so that I can know that I can make rice multiple times a day and be sure that I will have the like calories that I need just in case all of my packaged food and all of my like, quote unquote, like normal food that the everyday stuff. stuff. If that falls away, then like dry goods, beans and rice, at least I'll know I have that. And then I'm at the store just trying to make sure I have those backup beans and rice and stuff. And, you know, I see it,

I see a big row of empty shelves and there's no, there's no rice. There's absolutely no dry rice. I can still find some like packages of pre-cooked $3, $3 a bowl rice for morons and sort of like placate myself that at least I have that. But that feeling like, you know, there's no, there's no rice. I feel like a surge of really visceral, really visceral apocalypse panic. And a lot of, and a lot of like, I hear the laughter of like, of like the type of preppers that I kind of like have always resisted the urge to become the kind of the stockpilers, the people with the ammo bunkers. You know, I have maybe 200 rounds of 22 ammunition for my, for my like squirrel shooter rifle. I have not, I'm not a big gun shooter, but I certainly didn't hoard ammo. I have like, I have like two weeks of food in my pantry.

And I sort of feel the panic that I know the preppers are lax. at me for feeling. You know, I feel, I feel. So, and then, and then, a kind of like, a calmer part of my super ego comes in and says, well, the supply lines are still fine. There's no, there, there, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, but the, but the, but the, but the, but where the rice comes from, nothing has changed so far. That's all fine.

The rice will come. I have, I have, I've, I've since gotten my hands on. a little bit of rice. But that real end of the world feeling is, you know, is realer than it's ever been in the past, you know? And I was, like, I woke up in a cold sweat last night. Like I did that thing where you fall asleep for like 45 minutes and then you just you wake up and you're just like, you know, heavy breathing and all that, you know, and my wife's

just like, what's, why are you sitting? You had a bit of a panic attack. Had the old-fashioned, yeah, falling asleep panic attack. You know, and my wife just like, well, what's, why are you sitting up in bed? I'm just like, oh, no, absolutely nothing. No, that's completely fine. I wasn't just, I wasn't just having visions of like, uh, people, you know, looting a grocery store and us starving to death.

I certainly wasn't, it certainly wasn't that. Um, so I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm handling it well at all. I would say I'm in about as dark a places you can Not as dark a place as you can go Because I'm fine Seem to be healthy I don't have the virus Right

But also think about the places that are similar to us That are ahead of us Like Italy Right Which is terrible People are dying Cases are spiking Grocery stores are still open

Grocery stores are still getting food Yeah So And I keep checking I keep checking Our grocery stores still open in Italy. I keep, like, I want to, I, I want to know the second, if they aren't. If the food supply is interrupted in Italy, I don't want that information sneaking up on me. I really want to be on top of it.

I, like in the same way that I want to know that the worst case scenarios in good times, I am out there at the tip of the spear. The way my anxiety works is I'm out there at the tip of the spear. trying to figure out where the worst case scenarios are currently and how are they declining and becoming even worse case scenarios. I constantly got to know. In this specific case then, is that helping your anxiety at all or is it making it worse? I mean, that's the question, right? It's making me feel, I think what it's doing is it's making me feel sort of in control when I have absolutely no control. But that sense that I like have good information

at least gives me that illusion. I think we're, I think that's kind of where we all are. I mean, I, the last time we talked, I think that was during my long absence from Twitter, which was really good for my anxiety, really good for my mental health.

During this, I have not been. able to stay off of Twitter. It's, it, it's, that's what, that's the only place information moves fast enough. It's a nightmare too, though. Yeah. And like a really, and we have to be really careful because like misinformation and disinformation and panic also spreads on Twitter very fast.

And like a small kind of low stakes version of this that I watched. It was two or three days ago now. You know, I'm working for vice. I'm writing a lot about the coronavirus. I'm writing a lot about the coronavirus. about specifically, like, right to repair issues kind of around it. Like how, all right, this is how you hack ventilators to get more people on. And, you know, here are people that are sharing do-it-yourself recipes for how to,

like, how to, you know, make your own ventilators, these kinds of things. And I'd had like three stories that day and I'd shared them all on Facebook like I normally do. And then log in a little bit later. And they'd all been flagged as spam. Right. And this is, this is the first. time I'd ever, this is the first time I'd ever had anything like this happened to me. I'm not like a, I'm not a notorious shit poster. And I'm not putting lots of stuff out on Facebook. And then I'm like,

you know, there's a moment of like, oh God, what's happening? This is bad. They're censoring. You know, there's that flash of lizard brain panic that goes off in my brain. Then I log into Twitter and it gets worse because it's happening to everybody. And all the journalists are on Twitter. And what they're doing, we're all speculating. We're all sharing that we're being, you know, that were being quote unquote censored. Well, it's a technical glitch, right? But for like a couple hours, there was this mass panic amongst the journalistic class on Twitter.

There was a lot of smart people that I know and respect that were sharing bad information or sharing complete speculation. That kind of stuff's not helpful. I don't know how we stop it. I don't know how we, you know, because like that lizard brain panics and you lose a little bit of control over your actions. And I wonder if, and this is kind of something, I think you kind of saw broadly as you looked at these topics in your book, if sometimes the panic and the fear and the secondary effects of something like this are so much worse than the actual problem itself. Yeah.

I think they, I mean, that's kind of what in my, in my pandemic chapter, the one about the bacteria, not about viruses. that was one of the themes that I kept coming back to, which is that like panic is potentially as big of a problem as, as the actual disease itself. And I guess I was kind of telling myself that, you know. And now looking at that, it's like thinking about how slow the response to this was, I once again sort of kick myself for

for sort of playing the media critic when I was writing my only chapter that touched on pandemics. I didn't, I didn't, it wasn't about virus pandemics. It wasn't the movie contagion. That wasn't what I was trying to write. But if I had,

I would have talked about the urgency, the urgent need for testing at times like this. And the urgent need for people to be activated with social distancing and stuff like that. And like the difference between putting those measures in place quickly and efficiently and panicking in response to the media because they are different things. And so you get, and then you get responses like Elon Musk, which is like, you know, panicking about this is bullshit.

You get Trump saying that it's fake news because like it is kind of, it is kind of like, it makes you seem cool to be like everybody's panicking for nothing. It makes you seem like the, it makes you seem like a calm, collected person who like, everything,

everything just sort of like bounces off of me. I know that I, people are clearing out grocery stores. What a bunch of morons. Everything's fine. I'm Evangeline Lilly. My kids are still going to martial arts camp or whatever. And,

and like, no, you, there is, you, you, You have to sort out the right. You have to have the correct amount of fear.

That is the point that I'm trying to make in like everything that I write. You have to know how bad, bad things are in a, and as precise a way as you can ascertain so that you don't just resort to one or the other. So that you don't just say it's the apocalypse. Fuck it. First of all, so that you don't say it's the apocalypse. Because this isn't going to, this isn't going to extinct humanity. It's just a matter of how uncomfortable we're going to be and how big of a tragedy it's going to be and how much mass death there's going to be. But we're not going to go extinct from this.

And so you don't want to do that. And then you also don't just want to like go to your bunker or lose your mind and become a like doomsday prepper or the wrong kind. of doomsday prepper. And you also don't want to just dismiss the whole thing. You know, if there's one thing I was trying to do when I wrote the book, for myself anyway, it's to figure out how scary, scary things are so that I will be, you know, emotionally ready to to seek out, like, the facts that I need in the moment and get through it. And, you know, I think we're all kind of, like all bets are kind of off at this point because because we we didn't have a very we were we were caught so totally flat-footed by this we all were we're just you know all of our

pants were down um you know I think not to not not again not to sound like Trump and be like nobody predicted this of course people predicted it but we we had heard warnings about contagions in the past and had not quite processed them in this way. We had not realized what it meant. I mean, in a very literal sense, we had not processed the fact that we'd all be stuck in our houses. I had not processed the fact that if the contagion happened, that I would be right here in my office all day long, because that would be the reality. I mean, that would have been, that would have been the takeaway of a chapter if I had written it, but I didn't process it that way.

So having the right amount of fear, having the right amount of, you know, trying to gauge the right amount of panic, it was the, it was the concept that was trying to guide me as I wrote the book. It's like, and my book was about a different kind of pandemic than this, certainly. And it's sort of like, I didn't give myself this assignment, so I can kind of forgive myself. But am I kicking myself for not, for not envisioning this? I totally am. I totally am. I wish I could have guided people through this exact thing. And now I feel like I'm playing catch up, writing a ton about.

it, trying to feel some kind of sense of control. And I don't know. I don't know if I owe it to myself. I don't know if I owe it to other people. It's not like I'm everybody's resource for this kind of stuff. But it's like in my own head, I'm like, you had one job. And it was to figure out what was the right amount of panic for something like this. Let's take a quick break right here.

You're listening to War College. We're on with Mike Pearl talking about what everybody's talking about. All right, War College listeners, we are back on with Mike Pearl talking about. the coronavirus. When you say we, we ignored warnings, are you talking about America specifically or are the planet kind of more broadly?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm talking about the planet more broadly with the exception of like, like the densely populated eastern coast of China, where they have like a pretty good, a pretty good sense of how to deal with these things because they've dealt with a couple of them in the recent past.

Japan, Korea, Singapore. They, I think, had all envisioned this in a clear and lucid way because they had all lived through it fairly recently. So, you know, they had things like fever clinics to send people to. They had the ability to just zap you with a thermometer gun as you're getting on the bus and usher you away to a fever.

fever clinic where you can get tested. They were able to put that infrastructure. Explain what a fever clinic is. Because this is something I learned about recently, actually. I hadn't heard about them until all of this started. So this was something that they set up, I think, during SARS. And they had just shuttered them. They had just kind of shuttered them for the next pandemic.

And then they reopened them. And what they do is they take your temperature when you're somewhere out in public and if you have a fever, then you, then they're going to tell you to drop what you're, they're going to make you drop what you're doing. They, you know, they're an authoritarian country. They, they will seize the authority necessary to say, you're not going to grandma's house. You're going to a fever clinic right now and you're going to go and figure out what you have so that we don't have a person with the virus just out there. So it's a, so it's a matter of being able to figure out who's at risk in the immediate vicinity for, you know,

or seeing who's, who potentially has the virus in the immediate vicinity by taking people's temperatures, and then sending them to these numerous fever clinics where they'll be cohorted and tucked away, they'll be contagious but isolated until they figure out whether or not they have the pathogen of the moment. And then if they find out that they have a regular flu, then they're like, okay, you have the flu. You know, go home and drink some soup. Or they'll be like, well, now you need to go be isolated because you have the pathogen that we are, that we're dealing with right now.

And that set of like testing and isolation procedures just keeps so many. Obviously, it doesn't keep all contagious people out of, out of like, out of the streets off the buses out of the trains, not in stores, but it moves so many vectors for disease into isolation that you end up seriously, it works. It like seriously reduces the, the amount of spread that you get in that critical first moment, you know, before it's been determined that it's a pandemic, they seriously bring down their numbers. And I mean, this was the practice that they had, especially outside of Wuhan, that like really, really helped too slow and, you know, in some ways it looks like completely halt the, um, the, like rise of

the, of what at the time was just a, uh, China-wide epidemic. And in Singapore, you know, that's, that's kind of even in some ways more authoritarian than China. Um, it's a weird country. Uh, and they had, they had similar and I think even more stringent testing procedures there. And that worked great. You can go to a crowded, you know, sushi restaurant. and eat hand rolls that were pressed into a ball of rice that, you know, right in front of you by a sushi chef and be confident, you know, that you're not going to have. You could be doing this right now if you were in Singapore. And, you know, instead we're all locked in our houses. So obviously there were people who had envisioned this for Trump to say like, oh, this, this totally took us by surprise.

That's bullshit. It didn't take everybody by surprise. But I do think for the most part, the U.S., Europe, Australia, we, we, we, we. we mostly, for the most part, we're caught completely off guard. I feel bad about that, but, you know, it's not like people turn to me for information in times of every crisis. But, yeah. Something else that caught my ear, as we were talking, is what's the right kind of doomsday prepper? Dagmeen, I don't know.

We're in the process of, we are totally in the, we are, that's what we're, figuring out right now, I guess. I don't, I didn't, I've consistently not had enough dish soap in my house through this process, which has resulted in me having to go to the, to the store a lot. And, you know, and every time you go to the store, no matter how careful you are, that's, you're introducing, you're introducing so much chaos, no matter how many, like, no matter how many wipes you use on all of the hand cards and stuff like that, you still, you know, shouldn't be out there. So it's like, oh, well, I am learning that I did not stockpile even reasonable stuff correctly.

Just for, just to be able to stay home, I would have thought that I could stay home for two weeks. because, you know, just as a rule of thumb, you should be able to stay home for two weeks. You should be able to just whatever you're doing, you should be able to just sort of like drop everything, lock your doors, and stay inside for two weeks. It's not the apocalypse. It's just sort of like, you know,

if you need a shelter from a hurricane, if like, if there's some kind of natural disaster out there, just as a rule of thumb, I think in the safety world, you should have two weeks of supplies. on hand. And that's always been my, that's always been like the guide in the back of my head. I always, I guess I just always figured like, I have, I have two weeks of supply, give or take.

I don't have like an Excel spreadsheet of all of the things that I need, but I have, I have give or take two weeks of supply. And this has taught me that, that no, I don't. I'm totally, I'm totally at the mercy of the, the grocery store. store, the retail in my neighborhood to sort of like keep myself reasonably alive and safe at home. I'm totally at the mercy of all of those silly retail establishments, those like disorganized, crappy grocery stores and various kinds of retail that like, that, that, you know, all of those places that are the scenes of, of like meltdowns in movies about the apocalypse. Like, I'm totally, I still am totally dependent on those.

So I was not, I did not learn even the reasonable lessons of being a prepper to my own, to my own satisfaction. I thought I had, I thought I had a handle on it, but I'm learning that I did not. So I guess that's my answer, but I, but I don't know because now, because we have, We have so much still to learn about what we're supposed to have in our houses and we still really, really do not know what's about to happen and what we need to be ready for, you know. Now, again, we're recording this on the 20th of March, and I don't know exactly when it will get out, but thinking like the next two weeks are going to be very interesting in America. Exactly. I know. That's what I was just thinking as I was saying all of this stuff. It's like, it's like in three days, are people going to be firing up this podcast and going like, I can't listen to this. This was before martial law. Like this is, you can't use any of this information anymore. It sounds silly now. So, yeah. You know, it's, it's weird as we've been, I've been taking a lot of comfort in dispatches from the past, like listening to podcast, listening to some of my favorite podcasts from like a, year ago.

I see, well, some of that stuff is interesting. If you go back, if you go back and listen to stuff from like two weeks ago, it all sounds so silly and naive.

Yeah, that's no good. Yeah, I agree. Like, you have to go back like at least six months. But yeah, just from like very, very recently, yeah, it's no good. It doesn't work.

It has to be something like, and I guess that's, I guess that's encouraging me to get this one edited and out quickly before everything's completely, outdated and we sound like complete fools. Yeah. Because like, yeah, I mean, my, my parents are getting information from, I have this, a distant relative. I don't, I don't think I'm in any way outing this like very, very distant relative who is, you know, he's like a, he's like a big NRA guy. He's in his 60s.

He posts a lot of Facebook posts that use the cry laughing emoji. If I'm kind of like, I'm trying to paint a picture of. Yeah, I can, I know that guy. Yeah. Yeah. So he has a, he's pretty well off. He has some kind of business. I think it sells, I don't know, like pharmaceutical.

He's not somebody I know very well. I think he just like owns a pharmaceutical middleman business. So he's a millionaire. And, and he's been feeding information to my parents who are also in their 60s. And so he was one of the people. Remember when that rumor went around a couple of days ago, like on Tuesday, Trump's going to shut down everything. And, you know, you're going to need to stay inside because there's not going to be,

you'll only be able to go to the grocery store and everything else will be shut down. You won't be able to use your car. And then he got, you know, he woke up the next morning and was like, Oh, that was fake news. That was nonsense. So it was like, who's spreading this rumor? Well, he's still, whoever, that rumor mill is still pumping because he was on the phone with my parents last night saying like, no, that's still going to happen. And then this time there's going to be the military rolling through the streets, patrolling for looters because there's going to be so many looters.

And I was like, as my parents were telling me this, I was just like, okay, calm. down. We're not there. There are like all of these health department warnings that are telling us to shelter in place. But at the moment, it's not shelter in place or be shot. And we're not at the point yet where tanks are rolling through the streets. We're still very far from that. And as I'm saying that to my parents, I'm like, yeah, that could happen, but we're just not there yet. And like, I had not really, I had not really kind of like drawn a roadmap from where we currently are to tanks rolling through the streets. And I was just like, oh man, they're just, they're only jumping the gun by like maybe a little bit. We might not get there. We might not, you know,

we may may well. I hope to God we don't get there. But, but, but yeah, totally conceivable. Which, I'm curious about this. Which state are your parents in? Oh, they're also in California. They're also in California. Okay. So you're all in, Okay, you're all in Southern California. Sir, it is a different scene here in the south where I am. Wow. Oh, yeah. I mean, we do have the empty grocery stores,

but it just happened the last few days. And it is mostly, like, if you want to go to a Kroger or a Walmart, it's going to be fairly reasonable. But like the more upscale ones are the ones that are kind of wiped out. I was driving around today just before we hopped on this podcast. I just kind of wanted to look and see what a feel of the streets and the neighborhood were. And the Chick-fil-A was packed. Restaurants dine in are closed, but the drive-thru for everything was completely packed.

There's a Buntcake store that is still open, and I watched two women that are post-60s kind of shuffle into it. Today you saw a Today, Today, literally To literally hours before we hopped on this call. Yes. Wow. People are people here are not,

it's just not the same here. It's a different culture and a different attitude and people are not as afraid yet. Now you go down, I live kind of on the outskirts of the main city and you go down into the main city and it is much more deserted. But it's kind of, It's everyone's having a different reaction to this and panicking at different levels and afraid at different levels.

And I think there's a lot of people that are going to be defiant about what they are supposed to do until it gets really, really bad, until it affects someone that's in their family, I think. Yeah. Or someone they know. That's going to be that's going to make all the difference, right? Because like, because like, I think, I really think like the, the, the news consuming ethos of. of a lot of people is that, you know, everything that happens on the news is a cool show that doesn't really impact you. And your, and your politics kind of only change, you know, when you have, like, when a,

when a news event affects somebody in your, like, immediate family. I mean, it was like, like, 10 years ago, there were all of these stories of, like, Republicans being, like, I'm pro-gay marriage because, you know, my daughter's gay, and I realized that she deserves love or, whatever. And you know, and you just see this, and I don't mean to, and I don't mean to launch into like old-fashioned partisan stuff. It sounds so outdated now. But it's just like there are so many people in this country who really only, they do not make a connection between the news and real life. And, and like, I mean, that's the point I'm trying to make. It has nothing to do with gay marriage or whatever. But like, like the news is the news and real life is real life and near the tween shall meet. And I think a lot of us here in the here in the city, I don't know for whatever reason, have a much like shorter. There's a much, there's much less air between what happens on the news and what happens in real life for us. Somebody else tell me why that is.

But yeah, we got there. I guess we got there faster. I don't know why. Well, I mean, I think the answers that, I think the answers to those questions are complicated and maybe out of the purview for this particular. podcast. Right, right. Little bit we did it to ourselves, a little bit. Anyway, set that aside.

Yeah. Another thing, something that you, another thing that's, I've been, really has been going through my mind and that you touched on earlier in this conversation that I want to bring it back to, and I kind of want to drill down on a little bit, is that, you know, when we watch Walking Dead or we watch these shows about, you know, mass panics in the apocalypse, you know, people are fighting over bread in the grocery store aisle and society collapses very quickly. The truth is that we have a lot of firsthand accounts and a lot of data on what happens in crisis situations. We know what it's, people have written

about what it's like to live in and survive in war zones. People have lived through pandemics and written about them before. And something I think is, is very interesting that I am starting to see stories about right now is that these times of stress tend to increase social bonds. Yep. People tend to come together. Yes, exactly. Thank you.

It doesn't, it does, like society doesn't fall, like life changes, civilization changes, but it doesn't collapse, right? There's no complete end of everything. People come to get, especially in the communities immediately surrounding them, people come together and help each other. And that's part of how humanity has survived and thrived as long as it has. It's because we are programmed to do this. And every time something terrible happens, that comes through.

Yeah. I mean, this is everybody, right now, everybody should be reading, if they can get their hands on it. Rebecca Solnitz, Paradise Built in Hell, this book about studying, you know, how people respond to like, you know, trauma in their immediate vicinity, basically, when there's, when there are natural disasters, war scenarios, you know, and she, and she like, there's this, there's this dichotomy between the concept that she calls elite panic and, and civic temper. And civic temper is this, is this concept where, you know, outside of like, you know, away from authority and away from the elites,

there's this sort of like, we're all in this together mentality that just springs up spontaneously. And you suddenly get all of these things that like, you know, up until now in news narratives are typically dismissed as like holding hands and singing kumbaya. They always say like, this isn't Solnit, this is me.

Oh, people just don't hold hands. hands and sing kumbaya when people are constantly appealing to like quote unquote human nature human nature is thought of as the idea that like everyone's in it for themselves and will kill you the second they do not feel a hundred percent comfortable and and it's like taken as a it's taken as an article of faith particularly in america the minute anybody doesn't have theirs the minute they don't feel a hundred percent secure, they're a wild animal. They go feral, and you cannot count on anybody to help anybody else ever. And zombie fiction is based on this cultural myth. And it just does not, it just does not conform to, you know, reality, basically. And the

reality is that, like, we'll come together. I mean, I think we're going to, I mean, we don't, we don't really know what's coming, but, you know, wherever you are in the next, in the next couple of weeks, you might, there are two major hospitals about a mile from where I live. I happen to be in, like, a hospital-dense area of L.A. And, like, Children's Hospital and the Kaiser Emergency Room, L.A. Children's Hospital where they do, like, children's heart transplants, a lot of, like, inspiring news stories happen there. And those places are going to be overrun. And it's going to, I mean, they might be.

They might be overrun. You know, it's sounding like it really could happen. And when that happens, you know, I feel an obligation if they need me, if they say they need me, if they say people are going to die, if they can't move supplies and they just simply don't have enough people. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if I'm having hero fantasies or what. But like I, but I, but those places are in my neighborhood. They're close by. And, and everything I read is telling me that, that, that people inside of those buildings who are in my community,

who are doing things that, that are extremely noble and, and to me, heroic. They're in there and they're worried. And, and I'm not, I don't think I have. an especially altruistic temperament. But if they, if those people in there say they need my help, they need me to come out and move boxes because stuff's got to get moved or they just need something. They need manpower. It's like, I'm here.

I'm ready. I'm not doing anything. You got it. And I don't know how many people in my neighborhood feel that way, but I'm guessing it's a good percentage. And if you look at something like Paradise Built in Hell, you see that that's not in any way an unusual instinct. I'm not saying these things because I'm a good person.

I'm saying these things because people, when it comes right down to it, people get worried about their community. And people become interested in their neighbors when they weren't before. And they want to help. Helping feels good. It's selfish. It feels good to help. And it pops up in times of like of stress.

And, you know, you, you, you wouldn't think so based on our zombie media. But like, but that actually is what happens. You know, I have an anecdote about this specifically. You know, I'm on. Do you know what next door is? Of course. Yes. We're being encouraged to use it by the county of L.A.

And I, bleh. Well, I'm on it. I'm on it right. I'm on it right now and I've been, I've always been on it. It's kind of a grim fascination for me because it's usually pretty terrible. And I will say that most of the time where I live, it has been like a lot of kind of paranoid crime reports and people sniping at neighbors. And in the past two weeks, it's completely changed. It's a different place. Wow. And we're setting up like, networks of people to go and get food and supplies for people that can't leave their home because of, you know, conditions that they have or because they're older and they don't need to get out of the house. And people are setting up like chore networks to help people out. Like it is even here where it doesn't feel like the panic has kind of taken hold as much as it has other places. That's still what some of people's first instinct is to set up these networks and start helping each other in the neighborhood. And it happened very almost overnight. That's amazing. I've been afraid to look at next door. I should go on there again.

You know, everyone's neighborhood's different, but I think that I think that you should, I think you should look. I think it might give you a little bit of hope, actually. Yeah, that sounds, that actually sounds kind of inspiring. And, and I mean, here, it's not even, it's, it's L.A., so it's like, it has a tendency to be, like, a lot of, like, parking-related. stuff when you go on next door. So I have a feeling people are a lot less worried about parking than they used to be.

Like there's a lot of bars and restaurants around here. And so people are like, you go on next door and it's just like, people are parking in the wrong place. They're putting in a new row of restaurants. Where are the people going to park? I demand that my parking pass be respected in these streets. It was great. It was like, for me next door in this neighborhood was like, it was, you know,

parking complaints.com. So it sounds good. I will check it out because it sounds like it could be inspiring for once. Yeah, I think everyone's going to be, and I think this is a good lesson for us to learn. And one we maybe haven't really had since World War II in this country. People come together in times of crisis. Yeah.

They really do. And this is going to prove that point right. With pandemics, there's always like a level of paranoia because, and I think this is part of why the fear is so bad for stuff like this, is because it is invisible. Yeah. You know, and that's that kind of that thing that some zombie fiction speaks to, right? You don't know who's infected at the beginning.

Yeah. And that's going to hit us, too, but I think the overwhelming need to help each other is going to win out. In the literature and in history, it always does. It does. I mean, it, it, it's cause for, mixed in with your pessimism, I think that kind of thing is cause for cautious optimism, you know, when like right after, like right after 9-11, if you can, if you can cast your mind back that far, there was this whole New York post-9-11 thing where everybody was being nice to each other for like a month. and everybody was babysitting for each other's kids and checking in on each other

and everybody was smiling at each other on the streets and and that was just out of like a shared sense of like grief basically and a need to like manage the sort of like repairs and the big like huge crater that came from that

but like most of the city wasn't directly most of the city wasn't directly most of the city wasn't, you know, they had dust in the air, but they weren't like, they weren't quarantined or anything like that. And yet there was this sort of like, this like time to be nice. And then we immediately turned around and 9-11 turned into a, a global forever war that we're still in. And so we don't have like, we don't really have a lot of positive memories of like the fallout from 9-11. But yeah, I mean, this is, this is a, like, hey, I have a question.

What do you think this falls on the scale of like world events? Is this more, are we in something more significant than 9-11? What do you think? Where do you think it's going to fall on that scale? Me personally. I think this will be more significant than 9-11. Do you think this is going to, okay, interesting. I think you're probably right.

I mean, we have no idea, but it's fun to guess. Yeah, that's something I do want to stress is like, I'm just, just a guy that likes to read books and ask people questions. Yeah. Um, and that, and so I don't know. But yes, that's my personal opinion based on the little knowledge I've gotten this world. I think this will be bigger than that. This will affect our lives more. That's wild. And like, yeah, I was, I was talking to, I was like playing those guessing games with my wife the other day. I was like, um, I was like, so this isn't going to have this, this they, nobody's projecting a death toll as high as World War II.

But is this like potentially a bigger deal than World War? And she was like, nah, it's not a bigger deal. And I was like, okay, fine. It's not a bigger deal than World War II. But we're having that conversation, you know. Yeah, a couple times in every life, there's going to be two or three of these things. Yep. This is the second one you and I have lived through.

Yeah. And it is going to change the way we live. I just don't know how yet. You can't toss millions of service workers out of a job and not have repercussions that are bigger than just they're out of a job for a couple weeks. You know, like there's all these knock on effects that are further than just the pandemic itself. Yeah, a lot of people are going to die. but there's going to be huge effects to the economy. There's going to be new legislation.

It's an election year. You know, it's just, we don't know. It's going to be different. I can't tell you how. I just know it's going to be different. Remind me, how old are you? I am, oh, how old am I? 36.

Oh, we're almost the exact same age. So you, so I'm 35. So I graduated from college and then the financial crisis just like completely knocked me on my ass. And I've lived with that as like my formative financial experience. And like and then here come the zoomers. They were entering, you know, this like this like extreme bear market, you know, record climbing of the Dow. So everybody was like, no, it's prosperity from here on in. How can markets don't crash?

And then now we're having, you know, this is like almost certainly going to be as bad as, if not way worse than that crisis. And another generation is financially ruined. They didn't even get to finish. They were going to, they were about to finish college, and they don't even get to do that. And then they're going to enter the job market during another horrible recession. So, yeah, we're, we're, we're, the, the faith in the, our faith in the, our faith in the, our faith in the sort of like marketplace was totally rocked by that. The faith of the generation after us totally rocked by that. So, um, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't foresee people, uh, I don't foresee a lot more people reading, um, um, what's his name?

The guy who wrote the end of history. Oh, Fukuyama. Yeah, I don't see a lot of people reading Francis Fukuyama anymore and thinking like, oh, yeah, everything's, this is the way things are. It's just, it's just going to be boring. It's just going to be boring people in suits, sort of being puppet masters of our economy, and we're all just going to kind of work in this system forever. And that's the rest of time. It looks like that's not how it's going to work out. Didn't shake out that way.

Change changes the norm, right? Yep. On the scale of things changes the norm. Everything changes all the time. Nothing lasts forever. And it's still, like I said, it's still early days to even see where this is going to go. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, but I have a brain disease where I have to, where I can't live in the present moment.

If I'm scared of the present moment, it's because I'm scared of what I think is going to be. You're constantly, you're constantly catastrophizing just. just all the time. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, everyone feels that way to a certain extent right now, right?

I think. Especially if you're plugged, if you're too online and you're plugged into the, to the news, then it's just, it's bad. And we, you and I should both log off of Twitter,

but I know that we can't. I've been watching a lot of Michael Bay movies. And really? Yeah, that's, that's been nice. I've enjoyed that. It's like,

like, the movie pain and gain, starring Mark Wahlberg and the Rock. is a really, really nice escape from all of this. I can't think of anything further from COVID time than pain and gain the movie directed by Michael Bay. Highly recommend. Ten out of ten. Producer Kevin Nodale, who isn't with us at the moment, which I'll explain why in a minute.

It's not good. Also a huge fan of pain and gain, actually. Wow, okay. And he's been trying to get me to watch it forever. Oh, well, I mean, you run, don't walk. I'm going to wrap things up here. Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show and working through both of our anxieties.

Thanks for having me. I will continue trying to figure out whether I'm doing it right or wrong. But it was good to talk about it. Absolutely. And kind of to let you guys know what's going on with Kevin, he was in the Middle East, or he is in the Middle East doing a bunch of reporting there. He's probably going to try to call. call in here the next week or two to do an episode about kind of what COVID looks like from what

he's seeing and how it's kind of, you know, screwing up a war. But at the moment, he was set to fly back at the end of March. I believe his flight has just been canceled and he's trying to figure out a way to get out of the Middle East as we speak. And like so many other things, we don't know what's going to happen. Jesus. Christ. Wow. Yeah. But again, you come to War College to hear that depressing ending, so I've given it to you. Thank you so much for listening, and please be safe out there.