Making Sense with Sam Harris - #192 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Sam Harris and Paul Bloom speak about the psychology of adapting to the coronavirus pandemic, the disastrous analogy between coronavirus and flu, the political siloing of information, true and false concerns over "panic," pressuring China to close down their live animal markets, the economic implications and possible silver linings of the pandemic, what our response suggests about our ability to deal with climate change, Biden vs Sanders, the ethics of praising one's enemies, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, I just want to point out that it's taken a global emergency to cause me to change my music back to the old music. Many of you will be relieved and consider it a fair trade, global pandemic, for getting rid of the new music and the newer music and reverting back to the classic coke of the old music. So apologies for the discombobulation. We will work out our music problems as the end times proceed. But now I'm back here with my friend and partner in social distancing, Paul Bloom. Paul, thank you for coming back. And it's good to be back. I like the new music. I know you're getting a lot of pushback on Twitter,

but I enjoyed it. Oh yeah, the amount of hate is unbelievable. I mean, I like it too, but even I recognized that there was a total mismatch between its upbeat vibe and some of the topics I was beginning to cover. And I just, coronavirus aside, the idea of dropping that music against nuclear war or child pornography or whatever else I had come in, it just seemed wrong. So, you know, I've known you for a while and I've always wondered what you would do to cross the line. And it turns out to be the music. Yes. The most controversial misstep I've ever taken. That's right. So are you social distancing? Yeah, I am pretty good at it

at this point. I must say I, it did not take long for me to snap into gear here, and this has been such a strange experience because, I mean, everyone must be experiencing this. At whatever point they began to take this seriously or began to notice the culture taking this seriously, the experience for all of us is of time compressing in this amazing way where, you know, three days, much less a week, seems like an eternity. I mean, you and I recorded our last podcast, I think we released it about 17 days ago on February 28th, and that now seems like a different period in human history. I think we hardly mentioned COVID. Things have changed so quickly.

Well, I think we had recorded that podcast a few days earlier, like the 24th. For my podcast with Nicholas Christakis, I went back and reconstructed my own psychological timeline because I was just interested to see when the dominoes began to fall for me and how out of sync I was with the culture and with many of my friends. It was on the 27th that I just, you know, pulled the ripcord. So, you know, it was right after we recorded that podcast. So I must have been thinking about it then, but there's so many sources of stress here and we can talk about them. But one thing that has been personally stressful is just to be early on this. I can sort of almost set my watch by it. I've been essentially like a week ahead of where society seems to be at. And there's something really toxic about trying to convince

the people in your life to take something that you're taking very seriously more seriously. So do you feel that now people are on the same page as you? I mean, my sense is about a week ago, people were in all different directions. Now, for the most part, I feel everybody is taking this extremely seriously, very worried about the Italian model, very worried about what will be two weeks from now. Do you feel that yourself? Well, with some very prominent and galling exceptions, there are people, you know, who privately are not taking it seriously enough, and I'm having to essentially attempt an exorcism on their brains, you know, just one-to-one on, you know, with a phone call. And then there are people, you know, who have a public posture who are not taking it

seriously, who I'm kind of back-channeling and receiving a lot of pushback. I mean, in some cases, total pushback. And it's very frustrating because some of these people have enormous public platforms, and it's just socially irresponsible not to have your facts straight at this point. And yeah, so some of this has been happening behind the scenes, and it actually connects with a conversation you and I were having last time around loyalty and the obligation or pseudo-obligation to treat friends differently. I noticed that if there's someone who's wrong in public about this, who I don't have a prior in public about this who I don't have a prior relationship with, certainly not a friendship,

I'm much more disposed to just kind of message at them, however harshly, in public. Whereas if they're already a friend, I feel like, okay, I got to go behind the scenes and try to get them to change their minds, you know, in private and then message something differently in public. And, you know, now that I'm confronting this in a pretty big way, I don't actually know what the right answer is. Do you have intuitions about that? It's a hard case. I mean, I think there's a middle ground. I mean, I've argued with friends of mine on Twitter, I've argued with you on Twitter, about issues where you can kind of intellectually disagree. And if it's all in sort of, you know, a positive atmosphere and with respect, that's fine. But this is a funny case because you want to be telling your friend here that he or she is doing something seriously wrong and, you know, risking people's

lives, risking people's health. And I could understand the reluctance to do that in public. It'd be better if you could persuade them in private. Yeah, yeah. I've certainly made a solid attempt and come up short there for reasons that are just completely disconcerting. I mean, I actually have no theory of mind for why certain people don't get that this is a big deal. I mean, there are obviously some memes that are doing real damage to people's thinking here. And maybe we should just talk about why it's hard to grasp this problem and why it was hard to grasp it early and to change one's behavior. I mean, one meme that I think has really been damaging is any analogy drawn to the flu. You have people saying, well,

the flu kills 50,000 people a year in the United States. If we were paying attention to the flu. You have people saying, well, the flu kills 50,000 people a year in the United States. If we were paying attention to the flu on this kind of granular level, we'd be terrified too. We'd be in a perpetual state of terror and no one would leave their houses and people would be insisting that schools should be closed. But we don't do that and we're right not to do that. So this whole coronavirus thing is insane. And there are people who are stuck on that bad analogy, who just don't understand. I mean, yes, flu would be appropriately terrifying if every one of us were going to get it in a single month in the United States, and we were going to crash our healthcare system, right? I mean, flu is also a big deal, but this is also by, you know, any rational estimation at this point, considerably

worse to get than the flu. Now, whether it's six times worse or 10 times worse or 20 times worse, we don't know. But, you know, anyone who thinks that if you're under 70 or even under 50 and have no comorbidities, you're just going to sail through this thing without a problem, that is not what we're hearing from the front lines. And we're not even at the point now where we're getting decent data on the lasting impairments among the people who are, quote, recovered from this thing. I mean, there's definitely some reports of lasting lung damage and heart damage. And so there's just no question the analogy to flu is a bad one. And yet people keep making it.

And imagine that it's true that for, imagine it turns out to be true that for young people, say, under 50, it will not cause much damage. You'll be experienced like a bad case of the flu and then you get better. Still, it seems to be bizarrely cruel to be indifferent to the suffering of older people. I mean, you could say to somebody simply, don't you have anybody over the age of 60 who you love, a parent, a grandparent, anybody who's compromised in some way, who's not as healthy as you. Or you could simply say, you don't even have to imagine whether you have somebody in your life. Can you appreciate that these people's lives matter? And by you getting sick, even if you

yourself are willing to take on the risk, the harm you could do to other people should be a factor in dictating your life choices? Yeah, and I think Nicholas Christakis made this point where if only out of altruistic, positively social motives, if you just understood that you, at your age, in your cohort, were just destined to be a carrier of this thing, you still have to worry about every old person you are going to come in contact with. When do you decide to behave normally around your parents or your grandparents? If you're an asymptomatic carrier, you're just rolling the dice with them, you know, with their lives. So it's something to

take seriously, even if you were guaranteed not to suffer much from this. So you've been talking to experts. And actually, I got to say that the episodes you had with Amesh Adalja and my friend Nicholas Christakis have been excellent. I am not an expert on this. I know nothing about it, except for the fact I've been reading Twitter nonstop for the last two weeks. But I am interested in the psychology of these things. And there's something about this situation, which it has certain features that make it difficult for us to appreciate. So the causality is funny.

We understand that if you are sick and you are showing signs of disease and you make contact with me, there's risk. And I should, you know, avoid you from that. But basically, the way this disease works is you can be perfectly healthy and asymptomatic. And contact with you, though it doesn't seem bad, is still bad. This disease shows signs of exponential growth. And we can look to other countries to see it happening. And that's a difficult concept for us to grasp.

We look around. We see everyone's fine. We're all kind of going to restaurants and bars and everything's fine. This disease has no enemy. It's not as if we're dealing with a malevolent agent. We're dealing with this sort of, you know, unfeeling, unconscious virus. And for all of these reasons, we're not really suited to think well about it. You know, we look around, we see everyone's walk around, people are fine. So we assume we're fine. And it's only when we reflect and we look at other countries and we use our, you know, we look around, we see everyone's walking around, people are fine, so we assume we're fine. And it's only when we reflect and we look at other countries and we use our, you know, rational capacities, we understand the terrible risks involved. to orient toward. First of all, it's the easiest one to have prepared for in advance because it was guaranteed to happen. I mean, it's literally like, you know, a tornado if you live in Tornado

Alley or, you know, an earthquake if you live in California. I mean, this is a point that Bill Gates made, like the threat of a global pandemic that was, you know, highly contagious and, you know, lethal enough to be of real concern, that was guaranteed to happen, right? And this is certainly not as bad as it could be. Whatever the outcome here, literally, even if millions of people die, this is still a dress rehearsal for something that is civilization canceling, which is certainly possible. That's right. The guy, Adalja, when he spoke with you, kept saying, you know, this is fine, this is not such a big deal. And then he said it was clear he was comparing it to some sort of form of bird flu that would kill 60% of people who got it and would ultimately, you know, be a species extinguishing event.

Yeah. So, yeah, it could be a lot worse from that perspective. But when we knew this was going to happen, I mean, this was not, this is not even as hypothetical or as debatable as climate change. There's no alternate argument based on evolutionary principles that xenoviruses aren't going to jump into our species and mutate and in a matter of time get worse, right? So we just knew this was going to happen, and yet we didn't prepare. And even when it's happening, and we know we are failing to contain the spread, and we're seeing this wave crash on the shores of other countries, I mean, even looking at what's happening in Italy, you still have people here denying the reality of this thing. And I mean, like, literally, did you see the photos from the last night at Disney World

last night? Yeah. I mean, I've seen Disney World. I've seen pictures of Florida beaches. I've seen, you know, wild parades and parties. These are images out of a pandemic movie, right? I mean, this is like minute 33 in the pandemic movie. You have just a crowd of doomed imbeciles just fighting their way into the magic kingdom, right? It's just...

So what do you think is going on with the doomed imbeciles? Do you think it's skepticism? And I should say, imbeciles... What the government has to say. As I pointed out, I mean, I know some of these imbeciles. Some of them are quite smart. Okay. So the smart imbeciles, what's up with them? Is it that they're just natural contrarians? Is it that they distrust what the government has to say? Is it a political thing? I don't actually, I mean, there are certain cases where I really do not have a theory of mind. I just think I'm stumped. But in others, as this thing was gathering energy for me in my life, and I

noticed that I was out of step with the culture and with the people around me, I noticed there was a marked difference between people who were very online and people who were just not online at all. I mean, the people in my life who just have never had a Twitter account, they have a very different information diet and a cadence of getting information on really anything. And, you know, so some of them were just totally oblivious. I mean, literally I had a, you know, very close friend, very smart guy, well-educated. Basically he thinks he stays in touch with reality and, you know, looks at the newspaper every day but he was aghast when I told him that he would be canceling his travel plans at a point when I would have bet my life he was canceling those travel plans I mean it's just there was no way those

plans were going to go forward and literally it took like an hour of conversation and you know sending links and like just trying to get into his head around this. So there are people who are not living in the year 2020 on some level with respect to information, but it also cuts both ways because I think the people who are very online can also get siloed into their preferred echo chamber. And, you know, the way the variable of politics is interacting here is pretty interesting because this is, when you look at what was happening in Trumpistan and on some level is still happening among Trump's fans, they've been so confused that they didn't even change their

story once the president changed his. They seem to be denying the gravity of this even when he's forced to declare it's a national emergency. So it's, yeah, I think it cuts both ways. I think people can really be confused online, but sort of in the normal course of events, I felt that the people who were not on Twitter in particular just were not getting up-to-the-minute information. And that's a factor. There's a factor which was true a couple of weeks ago. It's no longer true, which is it really was siloed politically, which is the liberals were very concerned about the virus. And the fans of Trump were listening to him to say, this is no big deal. We have it licked. Don't worry about it. And to his very limited credit, he changed his story. his very limited credit, he changed his story. Well, I think he probably changed his story. Well, who knows?

One major lever in his brain is what happens to the stock market, obviously. So he knew at a certain point he had to message to the market. This was interesting because this is not an irrational concern. I mean, the steel man version of the other side here is the panic is going to do more harm than the virus. What you don't want to do is crash the global economy because that has all kinds of other effects that actually do cost lives. People will die because the economy falls apart. If you can have a virus that even in the end might kill a million people in the United States, if you can absorb that blow without crashing the U.S. economy, that's much better than

crashing it in a panic. And I totally understand that. I mean, I've never been counseling panic. But the problem we've faced at every moment along the way here is that in order to do something that mitigates the problem at all, in order to do anything that flattens the curve, that spares our healthcare system, I mean, even if all of us are destined to get this thing, if most of us can get it once there are effective antiviral treatments, that's a completely different world. The only thing we can do to spread this out over time and contain it at all is to practice what everyone knows now as social distancing. But the paradox here is that in order to do the thing that will actually work at every time point, that thing will seem unreasonable at that time point. The time you need to close the schools

is when no one you know is sick yet, right? Precisely the moment where everyone's thinking, oh, come on, we don't even know anyone who's sick. Why close the schools? And so it's just, psychologically, it's almost a perfect exploit of our system. I mean, we just, we can't be strongly motivated at a moment when the very action being counseled seems irrational. And by all accounts, we acted too late. The United States was too late. If we acted a week earlier, two weeks earlier, the situation would be much better coming up in the future. And, you know, nobody knows what it's going to be like two weeks from now, but the irresponsibility of the government in its behavior and sometimes ongoing irresponsibility.

New York was very slow to respond, for instance, at the city level. It's going to have a cost. But you're right about it. So Yale, where I teach, has gone to online teaching. And I'm scrambling to get on top of that. And I'm doing social distancing and all that. And it's an inconvenience and it's difficulty. But there are so many people for whom this crisis is life devastating. Loss of jobs, loss of businesses.

In Italy, you don't have funerals. People die and they can't have funerals for for your you know people die and they can't get they can't have funerals there are people who are separated from their children from their families there's you know cancellations of weddings of critical life events so i think any you and i are in some way very fortunate that we're isolated from the true terrors of this event. But this is destroying lives. And I just wish we responded quicker. Yeah. And the concern about panic, there was a needle that had to be threaded here, and we still have to thread it. And every day it becomes more important that we do it. But it's not that we need panic, but we did need to be more alarmed than we were earlier. I mean, the analogy that comes to mind here is really to wearing a seatbelt.

I find that my anxiety around this pandemic is always at the boundary where I'm either trying to convince someone that they should take it seriously or trying to figure out what I and my people in my family and my immediate circle should actually do practically. But once you've figured out what you should do, then there's no need for anxiety anymore. You can dial the anxiety all the way down because it serves no purpose, but it really does serve a purpose when you need to be motivated to figure something out. And so like for me, it's like in the time when seatbelts were just being adopted, right? And

people had to be convinced to wear them and they didn't like them and they wanted to feel, you know, free in the car and they didn't like the feeling of confinement. And I'm sure there were all of these idiotic conversations where, in fact, there was one person in my life about 20 years ago, very close friend, still is one of my best friends, who did not wear a seatbelt. This is like in the 90s. He was not wearing a seatbelt. He was just a real outlier in my life. I could never convince him to wear a seatbelt. There was no argument that would work. And then he flipped his car and got needlessly injured. Perhaps he would have gotten injured anyway,

but he was not wearing a seatbelt. And you can picture what a car rolling over does to you when you're free to bounce around in it. He recovered from his injuries, which is great, but he was injured enough to reflect on the implications of being loose in a car at speed. So now, you know, ever after has worn a seatbelt. So there are some people who actually do need to be shown the horrific pictures of car accidents, right? I mean, to get motivated to wear a seatbelt. But once you're motivated, once you understand

right? I mean, to get motivated to wear a seatbelt. But once you're motivated, once you understand the utility, none of us have to feel anxiety when we get behind the wheel of a car to motivate us to clip in our seatbelt. That gesture now is an automaticity. And I think the same can be true of a response to a crisis like this. I mean, once you figure out what you should do, well, then you can just do that thing, and all this ambient anxiety can be dialed down. But it's totally appropriate to feel it when you're just basically uncertain about what you should do, and you have mixed messages, and you can't get, you know, your friends and family on the same page. Anyway, that's how I see it. So I think, you know, anxiety, you know, continuous anxiety is obviously counterproductive. And we have a significant mental health challenge on our hands when you have anxious people living in isolation and watching the stock market bounce

around and unable to work. Virus aside, this would be a very big deal for society. Yeah, people seeing their life savings drop and drop and drop and drop. And of course, things are happening very quickly. I'm in Toronto now, and the Canadian prime minister a few hours ago announced that Canada would basically be closing its doors to anybody who wasn't Canadian or for a short period, American. And so what governments do and how they respond and what the restrictions will be on your behavior is a constant source of anxiety. How long this will last. I mean, in some way, you're right from a sort of, I don't know, the Buddhist perspective that

once a decision has been made, there's no point to being anxious. Yet, nonetheless, you know, it's an anxious time. There's another aspect to this, by the way, you mentioned threading the needle. Neither one of us is a fan of Donald Trump. And initially what he did was he seemed, you know, relatively indifferent and unconcerned about the crisis. But there's another way I always worried he might go, and it wouldn't surprise me if he goes this way in the future, which is to rampant xenophobia, directing hatred against foreigners, against immigrants, and so on. And besides being, you know, morally terrible, this will make the crisis worse. If people, for instance,

if illegal immigrants, or even, you know, legal immigrants don't have access to healthcare, are afraid to enter the system, the situation will get much worse and not better. Yeah, I guess I don't really see the basis for that because if anything, Mexico should be trying to keep us out, right? It's true. I mean, once the scope of this contagion

becomes more obvious, it won't seem like this is, you know, coming from Asia or, I mean, now we think it's, from Trump's point of view, it's more coming from Europe, right? So it's really just, it's a human problem. I don't see how he gets, well, I'll tell you what, in the future, an appropriate demand, which could well be spun as xenophobic, but shouldn't be, will be a demand on China to close down these wet markets because they actually are akin to bioterrorism. It's negligence that is so obscene that it is almost an act of war. I mean, they are spawning these viruses.

almost an act of war. I mean, they are spawning these viruses. Anyone who's playing with a bat in one hand and a duck in the other is just a fucking terrorist at this point, whether they know it or not. So we have to clamp down on that. And I got to assume the Chinese government will, for all their authoritarian charm, they will see the wisdom of doing that. And it almost doesn't matter how they do it, right? It's like whoever's insisting that they need to play with bats needs to be dealt with in China. Okay. Well, no argument there. But I'm not as confident as you that Trump can't figure out a way to make use of this crisis. I certainly think he can make use of it in some horrible way. In fact, there's some report that he was trying to get a German drug manufacturer to move to the U.S. to produce a vaccine exclusively for the vaccine. It's like supervillain evil. And I'm going to be skeptical about that.

But it wouldn't surprise me if Trump just used this for more build-the-wall rhetoric, even though blaming Mexico for this is bizarre. But it wouldn't surprise me. Obviously, there's some data on how unlikely we are to be able to contain the spread of a virus by stopping travel. But, you know, insofar as we have better information, it seems to me that does become more and more plausible. I think we, you know, internationally, we do need to be agile on that front. And without any imputation of xenophobia, we just have to say, okay, no flights for 10 days. Let's see what the hell's going on

in that country of yours. So, I mean, that was the one move he made, which was, I believe, spun as xenophobic initially when he made it, although some of the spin turned out to be false memes circulated on Twitter. I think there was a fake tweet from Chuck Schumer saying that this is more racism from Trump. But I did support him canceling the flights from China, just on the assumption that it might work. Now, it obviously didn't. And the rest of his messaging was so appalling and insane that he did much more damage than one might expect. But no, I could see in the future Trump exploiting this, but I don't think the travel restrictions to date have been particularly xenophobic.

You know, like I just said, Justin Trudeau is doing the same thing for Canada, actually much stricter than what the United States has. And, you know, nobody sees this as a xenophobic move. Right. It's just designed to reduce spread. And so I've heard talk that there may be some domestic travel restrictions in the United States. It's a possibility. And it's not clear that's a bad idea. No, no.

I mean, the painful reality of this is that this is a massive coordination problem. If we could all just agree to stay home for something like three weeks, we could actually extinguish this thing. I mean, leave aside, I guess it's possible that people who already have it could be contagious for much longer than we might fear. I mean, I guess that's possible. You know, I don't think we understand the disease enough now to rule that out. But, you know, assuming this acts like many other viruses, assuming this acts like many other viruses, we could just all hole up for three weeks and have this burn itself out. And yet we seem absolutely incapable of doing that. And for that reason, who knows when life returns to normal and at what cost. And the terrifying thing could be in two weeks, three weeks, we could be Italy.

We could have our hospitals overrun, and people could be dying for lack of medical care. So that's the big worry. Yeah, and that's barring some fairly heroic social distancing. I think that it's reasonable to expect that at this point. So, I mean, certainly in parts of the U.S., I mean, in major cities. We've all learned a lot in the last few weeks. I mean, I had no idea that we only had 2.8 hospital beds for every thousand people in this country. And it's actually much lower than other countries. And it's much lower than Italy, for instance. And the fact that our hospitals already function at 65% capacity, it would be great if at tolerable cost, we learned every actionable lesson to learn

from this. Just imagine actually becoming more robust in the face of pandemic as a result of this and realizing that our healthcare system needs to be reformulated. And I mean, there's so many things that are kind of breaking through now, universal basic income. Yeah. You know, universal health care. It's just... Mitt Romney just suggested sending a check to every American. Yeah, yeah. Which, and it's not a bad idea. No, it's great.

I think it's much better, much more effective and much, much better than some sort of tax fiddling. Because if you send a check to every American, it'll mean more to poor Americans than rich Americans. While if you do stuff with the payroll tax, it has the opposite effect. Yeah, except I don't see in this case how it truly reboots the economy, because if we're avoiding a potentially lethal virus and are wise to, and therefore don't want to go to restaurants, just giving people money to go to restaurants is not going to get them to go to restaurants. So the restaurant business is going to suffer no matter how big that check is, except

for it'll help the people who are not working at their restaurant jobs. And who can't pay their rent. So in some way, you've answered a question I was going to ask you, which has been going around Twitter. People have been asking each other, so what are the positive effects of this event, assuming we make it through? And one answer you gave, which I think is the median answer and is the right answer, is that it's a dress rehearsal for the next one, which could be much more serious. So we could go through some difficult times, but if we learn from it and know how to respond intelligently and appropriately and

prepare, then when the next bird flu comes, we could be prepared. So that would be a plus side. Can you think about it? Yeah. Well, there are many personally and collectively. Just collectively, this is a wake-up call on so many fronts. I mean, the idea that we don't want expertise anymore, right? The idea that we can just wing it with a reality TV show star and his buddies in charge of everything. You have to imagine many people for whom the downside there was just an abstraction. Many, many people are tired of winning, I would say, at this point. And just take specific examples like, you know,

the anti-vax movement, right? I mean, just think of how nice it would be to have a vaccine for coronavirus right now. You know, anti-vax people are very quiet now. Yeah, I mean, I don't know which has been harmed more, the cruise ship industry or the anti-vax movement. And I don't know which recovers first, but that argument is over, right? And, you know, it should be felt to be over. And the indecency of it when it resurfaces should carry more opprobrium than it has in the past. But also just understanding that there are problems we have that are global in scale for which there really is only a global solution. We can't be America first for global problems, and that lesson has to become indelible. The flip side of this epiphany, however, is that given how hard we've found it to be to convince ourselves that this

pandemic that is just crashing down on us is worth paying attention to. I don't know how we get our heads straight around climate change. Just imagine if this were climate change, right? And you had reports out of Italy that climate change has arrived and the hospitals are full and they're having to triage patients and deciding whether a 45-year-old with two kids should live over a 55-year-old with three kids. And that's all due to climate change. And, you know, we can track its progress across the Atlantic, and it's coming to New York, and we still can't decide whether to pay attention to it. That's the situation we're in right now. And yet, you know, climate change is this multi-year, multi-decade abstraction.

If our psychologies are unprepared to deal with this, as they seem to be, at least in part, they are grossly unprepared for climate change. Because, you know, here we have to be able to think forward to two weeks and see, here's what we'll be for two in two weeks if we don't act you know for climate change means 20 years 10 years 20 years and it's it's difficult it's a difficult coordination problem there's this line that i think ronald reagan was actually the first to say but it's sort of a standard social psychology thing which is what will bring the world together is, you know, an alien invasion. Yeah.

Aliens attack, we'd all come together, we'd have a common enemy. And, you know, that might be right. There's some, you know, social psychology work suggesting a common enemy really does bring people together. But I don't think the virus cuts it. It doesn't seem to be having that effect. And climate change doesn't cut it either. I think the common enemy actually really has to be an enemy, an intelligent, malevolent creature we could fight against. These causal properties of biology and physics don't seem to inspire us in the same way. Yeah, the time course is really hard to get your mind around when you think about a slower moving problem than this and our inability to be motivated by it. That's pretty sobering.

That's a nice way to put it. It's too slow moving. It's too slow moving. And again, I think, put it this way, I think the people, whoever coined the term, the war on cancer was kind of a genius. Wars motivate us. Wars excite us. Wars drive us. And that's a useful metaphor. Now, it's not as simple as say, let's have the war on, you know, COVID-19. But if we could think more that way, we'd probably respond better. Whatever the remedy is here, it's going to be recognizing once and for all how the free market is not optimizing for responsiveness to certain enormous problems, right? And the fact that we're noticing

that our supply of mission-critical things is running low already, right? I mean, just the ventilators. We're not going to have enough ventilators, right? And we get all of our drugs from China, right? I mean, just imagine somebody was, I mean, we don't happen to be at war with China at the moment, but someone drew the analogy to, you know, just imagine if we outsource the production of all of our bullets, you know, all of our ammunition to China, right, then we get into a war with China and we expect them to supply us with rounds for our guns. I mean, it's just ridiculous that we don't have the infrastructure to produce specific

life-saving things that we know we're going to need. So we have to figure that out. And the idea that we don't want big government meddling in our lives at these points is just insane. I mean, so the libertarian fan fiction that everyone has been reading in Silicon Valley for the last 30 years, right? You know, all the devotees of Ayn Rand have to ream this out of their heads. You need a government big enough to handle problems like this. out of their heads. You need a government big enough to handle problems like this. And pandemics turn us all into socialists.

Yeah. You know, and I've actually seen, I've seen some people on Twitter who are pretty libertarian and everything in there. This is, this is, this has been a... If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast,

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