Best of the Week - March 29, 2020 - Joe Rogan Experience

If I was a conspiracy nut or if I was a country that was conspiring to take over the world, this is not a bad way to do it. I don't think that's happening right now. I want to be real clear, but it's kind of the same result that we're experiencing right now where everyone's being forced to shut down with who knows what consequences, but it's also the right thing to do. So we're all like, whoa, how do you, you know, it's another one of those things about being a person where the right thing to do still feels crazy. Still feels like, all right, we're just going to sit around. Yeah, I guess that's what you have to do. You know, it's kind of in one way encouraging that so many people are willing to stay home and people aren't rebelling. They're like, fuck you, this is my country. I'm going to go to work. I'll take a chance. It's everybody's going to get it anyway. Fuck you. There's way less people doing that. And when you consider that the government is controlling 320 million people, pretty crazy. Almost everyone's complying with staying home. There's only a few essential businesses. Yeah, we're going to have to, I think really have spacesuits to leave the house and work. God damn it. They're going to probably be like this, this metal plastic thing that could wash off. Really? They're going to be padded. Dudes are going to put socks in their spacesuits. It's going to be a mess. Are you worried, Jamie? Yeah. I've never seen you this worried. Because everything you're sort of saying, like I look into the future and sort of see where we're headed and I don't see a, I don't really see much out there because I don't know where it is, but it's not anything good because there's nothing there I don't see. Like going to the movies again, seems like that's probably close to out. Movies were already dying anyway. They might not survive this. They've already opened up the ability to like put those right into your house for 20 bucks. Perfect. Way better. Sweet. So when are movie theaters going to open again? All right, what's next? Yeah. Concerts, sporting events. Yeah. I don't know. That's just, those are all the fun things we used to do. So like, fuck. It's also once everything's in place where they can treat people effectively and they have the adequate number of ventilators, then are we going to go back to the way things were or are we going to have new standards in place? I don't know. I don't know, man, that they look, they did an unprecedented thing. They locked down the entire country to save people's lives. Never happened before. We're in new territory and you know it's dangerous when a moron like me is making sense. And I'm, when I'm one of the people who's talking about something like this, give us your take on how we got here because this is a, it's been very strange. The president completely miscalculated what was going to happen and the way he was explaining it to the news, he was kind of saying that it was just a few cases and they'll be gone. And now obviously New York City shut down. The entire country is separated from each other. Everybody is isolating at home. Give us your take on how we got here. Well, you know, the truth is we knew this was coming or something like it. We had a heads up and even a heads up before last year because this is now our third major coronavirus disaster of the 21st century. We had what's called SAR, severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003 that started in China and caused a terrible epidemic in Toronto. It actually took the Rolling Stones to do a concert to bring the economy back to Toronto in 2003. And then it was mayor's coronavirus infection in 2012 and this is the third one. So we actually realized that coronaviruses were going to become a new thing and we embarked on a big coronavirus vaccine program a decade ago. And each time they've caused devastating hospital epidemics, they've affected healthcare workers. So the point is this unfortunately has become a new normal for the globe is terrible coronavirus epidemics. And we saw this one coming up in the end of 2019 in China and I knew we were in for trouble because that's what coronaviruses do. So you knew that we were going to be in trouble because there was no way they can contain it and keep it in China? Well, the difference with this one compared to the other two was this. The other two, SARs and mayors, now we call this new one SARs2. So there were SARs1, then mayors, then SARs2. So both SARs1 and mayors made you so sick and had such a high case fatality rate that anybody who got it was almost immediately hospitalized and basically out of the community. The difference with this one, ironically, is it's pretty lethal. It's about five to ten times more lethal than regular flu, seasonal flu. But also there's a big group of people who don't get very sick at all. And so you have this sort of perfect mix where it's not the most lethal infection we've ever seen. It's not the most transmissible infection we've ever seen, but it's high enough in both categories that it combines in this very toxic way. So what you have is you have a group of people who are getting very sick or in the intensive care unit like older people, those with diabetes and hypertension, even a group of younger people who are getting it very sick, and then a larger group who are only getting mildly sick who can still walk around the community and be out and about in stores and restaurants and infecting everybody. And so this is what's caused the problem. It's highly transmissible. There's a big group of people walking around spreading it and a smaller subset, but a big subset who are getting very sick and even dying in intensive care units. So that's what's playing out in New York City right now, for instance. Whatever is stopping people from funding medical research, I hope they open up the floodgates now. I hope they realize like, hey, you need more of these guys and they need a lot more money and they need to be way ahead of this shit. Well, yeah, because this is one pandemic. There are multiple different scenarios of how this happens again. Sure. Well, there was another guy that died recently on a bus that they identified as having a completely different coronavirus in China, but he got a virus that specifically hasn't jumped from human to human. It's only jumped from rats to humans. And the way it jumps from rats to humans is by ingesting animal feces or animal urine or animal fluids. So this guy somehow or another got some live bat fluid in his body and was dying on this bus and they pulled the guy off and he tests positive for a totally different coronavirus. That's killing him. What do you think would happen? I can imagine some guy gets Corona and he's got it fucking bad. Systems are shutting down. This is it. He's going to die. And he wants to have sex again, but he doesn't want to get anybody sick. Jesus Christ. So he fucks his dog. Oh my God. And then like all the symptoms go away and he realizes like he's found the cure and now he has this moral obligation. Like does he call the CDC and say, Hey, I'm kind of embarrassed to tell you guys this, but I think I cracked it. And what if it's only his dog? But if everybody has to come to his house and fuck his dog, we tried fucking a bunch of different dogs. There's no way to recreate this thing unless we fuck Marty, Marty, but I fuck Marty. No, we're all going to have to fuck Marty. There's a train of people every day outside of Marty's house. Trying to try to breed Marty. They can fuck the puppies. They try to do calculations on how many pumps it takes to cure you. You can't let people pump too many times. Poor Marty needs a break. Does it help if he blows you put peanut butter in my dick? See what happens. No, no, no. Everybody's like, the pounds are empty. Everybody's adopting dogs. Fucking dogs. Oh my God. Look, biology is so weird, man. That wouldn't even be that shocking. It's the way a disease gets cured. You have to fuck an animal. Yeah. How's it any weirder than some of the shit that's real? You have to realize that freedom is itself an export. One of the great dangers is that China has been exporting the benefits of freedom from the United States into an authoritarian system so that they get the benefits of both worlds. They get the benefits of our middle finger, which I think is the secret of American innovation. They get the benefits of authoritarianism where they can do things that we can't because they can order people to do the unconscionable. My feeling is I'm on Team Civil Liberties, and Team Civil Liberties has to be somewhat nationalistic, more militaristic, more command and control. Who would you take orders from? In a lot of fields, I'd take orders from you. You're the big dog in this space. To the extent that you wanted to coordinate something, I would use my channel. I would subordinate to you, and I would want sometimes people to subordinate to me if I was taking a lead on something important. When we have this fear of leadership, because we're all so individualistic that we never want to take an order. Whenever I'm training a new assistant or something, one of my always best practices is, can I get you coffee? It's very important to show that the ability to serve somebody else and the ability to lead are tied. You have to be a follower to be a leader and a leader to be a follower. You shouldn't be one or the other. We need more of a war footing. We need a war president. We need war senators. We need people of this mentality because the nap is coming to an end, and I do think Nancy Pelosi needs to resign, and Bill de Blasio needs to resign. I think that this administration made some good moves and fumbled the ball, and I believe that past administrations made some good moves and fumbled the ball. The imperative is to stop backpropagating what you want us to do, like defeat a prisoner's dilemma, and come up with a lie that would cause us to act selfishly rationally. If you tell me that a mask is actually more dangerous in my hands because it becomes germ-filled, then the idea is like, oh, okay, so I guess I won't use the mask. Well, yeah, because you lied to me, and the idea is that that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to say, what would need to be true to get you to do what I want?