Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1566 - Nicholas Christakis
Uploaded: 2020-11-18T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1566 - Nicholas Christakis' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1566 - Nicholas Christakis' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-18. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1566 - Nicholas Christakis

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day
yeah i got into cigars lately i did sober october and uh during the month of
october uh no drinking
at all i started smoking cigars how did the sober october work for you great we
do it every year
tonight's little reset it's interesting you know i mean i have another friend
of mine who stopped
drinking altogether uh and uh he he said that it was making him cranky when he
was drinking and of
course there were extra calories and uh i listened patiently to him and thought
i would love to do
that but at the same time it's hard to give up completely so i enjoy a glass of
wine with a meal
that that i missed the most that that was the worst when i was uh you know
having a steak and
just like kyle like a nice glass of red wine right now yeah but other than that
i don't drink much i'm
not much but much of a boozer although when november kicks in i know i can
drink again there's usually
a few days of excess which is uh speaking of the subject of uh covet 19 the
current pandemic we're
into that's not a good thing um there's a lot of people out there destroying
their immune systems
drinking there's a very funny video that i found online of this gentleman who
runs around his
neighborhood and uh he noticed that during the lockdown he would run around his
neighborhood
and he would see the recyclable bins and they were just filled with empty
alcohol containers he's like
this is crazy this this is for the weak like how much of these people drinking
just vodka and wine and
there's a lot of that going on yeah people have actually looked a little bit at
that at alcohol
consumption and it's a little bit like the toilet paper shortage i i don't know
if you followed the
the whole toilet paper shortage thing well what's happening is there's a shift
in consumption you
know a lot of the drinking that was taking place in restaurants and uh you know
at uh at uh bars is
now taking place at home so i think it's like half and half like half the
consumption in the past was
at home and half was out of the home and now it's almost all at home which is
part of it but i also
think as you're suggesting the actual amount is going up too so so yes it's uh
you know and it's
contributing to weight gain and other problems in our society the toilet paper
thing there's an easy
fix for this folks that's way better and i hate to do this to plug a sponsor
but it's a good sponsor
there's a sponsor called tushy and tushy makes a bidet attachment that just
fits onto a regular toilet
and it cleans your butt they're only 79 bucks and it's it's fantastic it cleans
your butt so much
better than just toilet paper and your it cuts your toilet paper consumption
down by like 85 90
because you just need a little bit of toilet paper to pat your butt dry at the
end do you ever use
one of those bidet attachments well my in greece they're not uncommon to have
bidets so you know in
this i i of course i'm familiar with them but we don't have one here but it's
interesting you should
get it again you should get one i'm telling you it's so much better we may we
may in fact you should
so uh i can't believe we've covered alcohol in bidets already yeah so let's
talk about this how did you
what what made you decide to write a book on the the current pandemic and the
disease
well i mean for me it started i i was reading news reports in january about
what was happening
in china but i wasn't paying a ton of attention and then i have these chinese
colleagues with whom
i've been doing research for a long time and they contacted me in the middle of
january we we had been
using phone data in china to study how uh earthquakes for example change human
social interaction so
after an earthquake who do people call and we could imagine that the first
person you call is very
important to you for instance and so we could use the phone data to study
social interactions
and so we decided to use the phone data to study the pandemic and um and to
study the movement of
people through china and how they might carry the virus with them which started
in wuhan uh in november
sometime and uh and and then we noticed or i saw in the data that on january 24th
the chinese were so
concerned with the virus that they basically detonated a social nuclear weapon
and they put 930 million
people almost a billion people under home confinement starting january 24th and
i could see that in
the data and that really got my because the emotions ceased people stopped
moving in the whole country and
that that that really got my attention and uh as and i got worried and it was
clear to me that this was
going to be a serious global pandemic and so i began to redirect the activities
of my laboratory at yale
to study more and more about about what was happening with this virus and we
did a whole bunch of projects
some of which if you're interested we can talk about we released this app
called hunala h-u-n-a-l-a
hunala which you can get thousands of people use it now it's like it's like
ways for coronavirus
it's it's not a contact tracing app that looks backwards it it crowdsources
information about who
you're connected to which is one of the things i study is networks and where
you live and forecast your risk
so people down the road from you are reporting a traffic jam or a cop and you
can exit the highway
and avoid that and people your friends friends friends are reporting a fever it
can ripple back
through the network and feed this information to you all anonymous it's it's
anonymized it's it doesn't
you know it doesn't report who is having what anyway and the app incidentally
temporarily
accesses your contacts we don't copy the contacts it doesn't copy that but it
makes it easier for
you to identify who your social connections are anyway so we did that we did a
whole bunch of other stuff
which maybe we'll talk about and so in the month of february as we were doing
all this work i was
getting more and more worried and and that our nation wasn't preparing and so
in march i started sending
out some twitter threads like epidemiology 101 like basic stuff and a lot of
those started to go viral and
and people were so hungry for information about it it became clear to me you
know factual information
about what was happening and then in the middle of march my editor my long-term
editor at little brown
a woman by the name of tracy bihar contacted me and said would you like to
write a book and i thought
yes and my motivation was that i wanted to help the american public understand
what we were facing and
i was very worried that people weren't taking this seriously enough and so so
that's why i wrote the
book i wrote the book because i thought this is something i know about this is
something i care about
i care about our country i didn't see our leaders as doing the things they
needed to do and i just
wanted to help people understand what was happening and and what was likely to
happen what do you think
should have been done that wasn't initially like in the january the month of
january it's when
everyone was alerted to the fact this was going on in china the white house
knew everyone knew but
we didn't really lock anything down until march what do you think should have
been done well first of
all the i people like me knew this was going to be a serious global pandemic
for sure by the end of
january and the president we now know unsurprisingly was briefed even earlier
right i mean if the president
you know wasn't didn't have more information than me then there's something
wrong there's something wrong
in our country and um but certainly by the end of january when china locked
down as we discussed we
should have begun immediately preparing our testing capacity uh manufacturing ppe
um we should have i
think begun the incredibly important challenge of preparing the nation for the
challenge we would face
like gearing up for a kind of war you know we were about to be invaded by the
virus so public messaging
would have been really important to tell people you know we're we're facing a
common threat we're going
to have to endure some sacrifice we're going to have to work together to repel
this threat
here's some basic information about the nature of the threat so all of these
things are ventilators
for example also another in you know sort of material that we needed um
preparing our hospital systems
for example we lost several months in which we didn't we didn't really prepare
and i honestly i don't
understand why our leadership failed us this in this way who's responsible for
them there was a there's
an also an issue where the pandemic response team that was in place for the
previous administration
was disbanded and sort of reassigned correct so i don't know yes i don't know
all the details about
that i know it wasn't just the obama administration they inherited the pandemic
response from the bush
administration and the cia has been identifying emergent um pandemics as a
serious national
security threat for a number of decades now as i actually discuss in the book
and of course people
like bill gates have been warning about this tony fauci was writing about this
stuff when you and
i were in elementary school so so there's there's a lot of institutional
knowledge about the existence and
nature of these threats and and so i don't i don't know why they weren't we
weren't better prepared
when we saw what was happening in china what could have been done differently i
mean obviously manufacturing
of ppe and all those things that that that absolutely should have happened and
that would
have actually avoided a very unfortunate thing that happened where fauci
actually was telling people
they don't have to wear masks and he later admitted the reason why he did that
is because he didn't want
people rushing to get masks and that would take masks away from the first
responders that's a very
very unfortunate thing that he did because that eroded people's confidence in
in what he's saying
it it it it lets you know that there are people that are in positions of power
like himself or positions
of influence that will lie for the better good but still lie
yeah so let's not uh so the details of the fauci statement
i honestly don't know i haven't dug deeply to know exactly what he said and
when
i can retrace for you some basics uh however about mask wearing early on
i actually put it on my my instagram because it was so crazy
when he was saying it it was an interview that he did on television and he was
saying
for the general public you know you don't have to wear masks he's not helping
you and
he was actually saying it might be bad because you'd be messing around with it
and
touch your face yeah you could so so initially it was a little bit initially
there was ostensibly
some confusion about whether it was advantageous to wear masks or not it's
clearly advantageous
it's advantageous to the wearer and it's advantageous to others it it reduces
the the stress
um on the system but if everyone were to wear masks and just to be very very
clear it's neighborly
wearing masks is like driving the speed limit or not driving on the opposite
side of the road
and it's there's now abundant evidence on the benefits of mask wearing and
furthermore and then
i'll come back to your fauci issue the um the if we were to all as a nation
wear masks and adopt
some other basic things it would allow us to keep our economy running better
and our schools open in
other words we can't have everything there's a there's a deadly virus that's afoot
and so we're
going to have to grow up and be mature do some things that are uncomfortable
and unpleasant and may
even seem silly but if we do those things we can we can avoid doing other worse
things like shutting
down our economy but anyway can i can i stop you for a second there because
this is something that's
actually kind of important when people are wearing masks here's like this is
the common argument against
it is that the virus pa