Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1453 - Eric Weinstein
Uploaded: 2020-04-03T19:00:30.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1453 - Eric Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-04-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1453 - Eric Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-04-03. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1453 - Eric Weinstein

What's up, brother? How are you?
Hey, Joe, how are you?
You good? You hanging in there?
I have not been off of my property more or less in two weeks,
so it's crazy to see another human being.
Yeah, I don't think this is healthy for us.
I know.
This lockdown shit. Everybody's so weirded out.
You want to run into people walking dogs,
like they don't want the dogs to get close to each other.
Like, hi, everyone's across the street. Hi.
And I'm a hugger, right?
Me too.
And we're in California, so I'm a hugger in California,
and all of my instincts are wrong.
Everything's all messed up. Everyone's confused.
Here's the big question.
How long does it take before we normalize and go back?
Like, let's say the end of July.
Everyone announces, we got this thing locked down.
We have a viable treatment.
It's no different than the flu.
It gets you this chloroquine with the Z-Pak
or whatever the current treatment is.
Yeah.
When do people start hugging again?
What do you mean? It's going to be crazy.
I mean, I think that the idea is we're all so starved for touch.
Yeah.
We're going to have a jubilee like you've never seen.
People are going to greet each other with tongues
who are almost like just acquaintances.
I don't think that's a good idea.
There's still colds and cooties and all that other shit.
I know, but I think everybody's losing their shit.
They definitely are.
I've been talking to a lot of friends
that are on the extremely cautious side, let's say that,
and, you know, they're not going anywhere,
and they're wearing gloves and masks when they step outside their house
to go do something in the backyard,
and they put the glove and mask down,
and they spray it with Lysol when they come inside.
It's not healthy, and it is also healthy.
I mean, the idea that we have not been tested in so long,
it's good to remember also that this stuff is live and real,
and it has always been live and real.
And, you know, if it was possible to live without this stuff,
that would be one thing.
But this 75-year nap that we've been in since 1945
is itself the greatest threat to all of us.
Right.
And our preparedness is just a wonderful indicator
where you actually get to see this is the quality of your experts,
this is the quality of your leadership,
this is what they look like when put under stress.
That's true, right?
That is a good thing.
And I'm impressed with the medical community.
I'm impressed with the people that are recognizing
that this is a huge problem,
not so impressed with the administration
of a lot of these hospitals
that have them prepared
in terms of, like, masks and ventilators
and a lot of these other things.
Not so impressed with politicians.
But also, it just seems like everyone, like you said,
was in this nap state
and hadn't really been tested.
And really, globally,
no one had been tested
since the pandemic of 1918 like this, right?
68, which I had,
I had the Hong Kong flu,
and 57 were sort of the best parallels to this.
You got the Hong Kong flu in 68?
I had the Hong Kong flu
and was sick as a dog in San Francisco.
I was like three, two,
I mean, three, four,
I think it went from 68 to 70.
Do you remember it?
Oh, yeah.
I was in San Francisco.
My grandma had to come up from L.A.
to care for me.
It was bad.
It was, like, one of my earliest memories.
Yeah.
And so 68 and 57, I think,
are the best comparables to this
before we go back to 1918.
And almost nobody remembers these things.
Like, it's very weird.
Many people had never heard of the Hong Kong flu
when I started talking about the fact that I'd had it.
Yeah, I vaguely remembered it until you just said it.
And then I'm like, ooh.
I'm slightly older than you, right?
Yeah, I'm 52.
I'm 54.
Yeah.
I don't remember the Hong Kong flu,
but I do.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't remember it personally.
No.
But you, as a health geek,
are up on these sorts of things.
And so you understand the ways in which,
you know, for example,
you can have a flu where the,
I guess the cytokine storm,
you know, the threat from your immunity,
your immune system is, like,
bigger than the virus itself.
There are all these various weird things that happen.
But I think that this,
let's call it the big nap.
The big nap is itself
the greatest threat to us.
And this is bad,
but it is also a shot across our bow.
And, you know,
this is what was happening in my mind
when I was on here talking about
the twin nuclei problem of selling atom.
We didn't stop history.
It's not like we're past atomic war.
Like, we figured that out.
We just hit the pause button for a little while.
We hit snooze.
Yeah, and the fear is also that
nefarious players will take this opportunity
to erode civil rights,
to erode civil liberties,
and then China to gain power in the U.S. market,
to gobble up a lot of stocks
while everything is down
and try to increase their stake in our economy
and try to push, you know.
China's got its hands lovingly around our throat
because our elite have been moving
into greater and greater states
of China dependence, right?
And so I think this is what the BDSM community
refers to as breath play,
and I don't like it.
Breath play is like you kind of like
half choke somebody?
Yeah.
How do you know that?
What?
I don't like the fact that you know that.
I went to MIT,
and MIT is wildly into BDSM.
Somebody asked why are geeks
and Aspies into BDSM,
and somebody said lots of rules.
What's an Aspie?
Asperger's people?
Asperger's people, right.
Lots of rules?
They like that?
They love rules.
Oh, wow.
Because to do all this stuff safely,
you would have to have a huge hierarchy of rules.
And my claim is that China is –
they supply so much of our stuff.
We've moved all of our manufacturing base
into these crazy supply chains,
and we are completely dependent on a strategic rival.
And China is very careful.
If you remember when they hosted the Olympics
to have these amazingly impressive displays
that are always friendly,
but what they're really saying is
we have our shit together.
and you don't.
And our system was hackable.
It was open.
For example,
if you have a company
that has a duty to its shareholders,
the directors of the company must do
whatever is in the best interest of the shareholders,
and everything else doesn't matter,
then you can have a situation
where a director has to move things to China
because that is in the best interest of the shareholders,
even if it's absolutely
not in the best interest of the United States.
This is what Ralph Gomery,
who used to head the Sloan Foundation,
once said in an address I was at
at the National Academy of Sciences.
He just said,
as a director,
I am incentivized to do exactly the wrong thing
for the United States of America.
So I'm going to put one hat on
and tell you,
as an American,
we must not move all of this over to China.
And then I'm going to put my director's hat on,
and I'm going to vote to move everything over to China
because I have no choice.
And so, you know,
in essence,
the smart good people,
all 11 of them,
were always fighting this thing about
you cannot become China dependent.
And during the big nap,
there was no way to make this argument convincing.
You couldn't say,
look,
we have a serious strategic problem
by your continuing moves
to bring China in
as the solution to every equation
we can't balance.
And that is really the problem,
is that there wasn't any ability to say,
we are way too dependent on a strategic rival.
You saw this at the beginning of the pandemic.
Everyone was afraid of what?
I don't want to appear xenophobic.
I don't want to appear like Chicken Little.
And so all of our friends,
the nutcases,
the marginal weirdos,
the supposed grifters and gadflies,
are the people who most got this one right and early.
And all the respectable people,
like Nancy Pelosi telling people,
please go to Chinatown
to celebrate the Chinese New Year,
Bill de Blasio of New York,
saying despite coronavirus,
get out there,
you know,
lead your lives.
Don't let this thing hold you back.
These people need to resign.
Nancy Pelosi should resign.
It's one thing to say,
we don't have enough information about this.
It's another thing to say,
take the information
that's coming in,
disregard it,
and get back in there
and keep fueling the economy.
This is exactly our leadership class,
their problem.
They think about this
in short-term economics.
The long-term implications
of us all sheltering in place,
nobody can compute the consequences of this.
Not one person in the world
knows what happens
when you run this experiment.
Yeah, it's a new thing, right?
The Made in America argument
was always like sort of frivolous,
almost xenophobic.
Like, why do you want things
made in America?
What do you care?
Do you not like people
from other countries?
Do you not want to buy things
from other countries?
It was like this Made in America thing
was like people disregarded it
in a lot of ways.
But when you realize
that all of our medical supplies,
like so much of our electronics,
so much of all the stuff
that you need
to kind of keep things
exactly the way they are,
it's cheaper to make it over there
because they will,
like what we saw with Foxconn,
where they put nets
around the building
to keep people from jumping off.
And the weirdest thing
was people trying to argue
that the suicide rate
at Foxconn
was essentially the same
as the suicide rate
in the general population.
Well...
Have you ever heard
that argument?
Yeah.
Like, what the fuck
are you talking about?
That's where they work.
There's nets around
where they work
because so many people
where they work
jump off the building
to end their life
because their life sucks that bad
that they kill themselves at work.
Do you know how rare it is
to kill yourself at work?
Probably pretty fucking rare.
You know how common it is
where you have to put nets
around the building?
You're like, look,
we're getting really tired
of people going to the roof
and jumping off
because it's the easiest way
to kill yourself.
They're going to get more creative.
Yeah.
The problem is
we are all hooked up
to this need
for cheap products,
profits,
when we can't figure out
how to innovate enough
to actually create
the juice in our own system
and therefore,
we have to rationally,
you were going to say.
No, I was just going to say,
I mean, also,
we've gotten into this idea
of every year
we have to have
a newer, better piece
of electronics.
Like, if you had to go
the rest of your life
with an iPhone 11,
how much would you suffer?
Not that much,
although I would say
that many of us
are not that excited
about the next phone.
That itself
is an antiquated thing.
Right, but what I'm saying
is, like,
why can't they make it
so that you can just fix
this?
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, who the fuck
fixes their phone?
You don't fix your phone.
You bring it in,
and they're like,
oh, you can get a new one.
Oh, you're going back to, like,
depression-era thinking.
Well, not depression-era thinking.
It's like,
why can't things
be sustainable?
No, no, no.
The plan's obsolescence
and the need
to constantly update
so that you never...
It's a tricky problem.
If you need growth
to power your system,
then in a weird way,
it makes sense
not to build
the optimal phone
because if you were
to build the optimal phone
and then people
stopped renewing everything...
Your system's fucked.
...then your system
weirdly breaks down.
So it makes sense
at the level of the phone
that you wouldn't want
to do that.
But weirdly,
in aggregate,
if you can't start innovating,
if you can't figure out
how to restart innovation
in a big way,
now you're stuck
with either having to
learn to live
in steady state,
which none of us...
Americans have no program
for living in steady state.
We need growth.
That was the whole point
of the embedded growth
obligation idea,
that it's suffused
throughout every institution.
Every pension plan
assumes growth, right?
Right.
All right.
So now we have this problem
where we don't have the growth
and we need the growth.
And then in a