Coronavirus Exposing China Dependence w/Eric Weinstein | Joe Rogan

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-pack 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. That like, 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. Well, I don't think that's a good idea. There's still colds and cooties and all that other stuff. 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 and they come inside and... 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. 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's 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 haven't 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? Sixty-eight, which I had, I had the Hong Kong flu, and fifty-seven were sort of the best parallels to this. You got the Hong Kong flu in sixty-eight? I had the Hong Kong flu and was sick as a dog in San Francisco. I was like three, two, I mean, three, four, something. I think it went from sixty-eight to seventy. 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. And so sixty-eight and fifty-seven, 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 had. Yeah, I vaguely remembered it until you just said it. I'm slightly older than you, right? Yeah, I'm fifty-two. I'm fifty-four. 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 cytokines storm, you know, the threat from your immune system is like bigger than the virus itself. There are all of these various weird things that happen. But I think that the, 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 Sel and Adam. 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 and 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. At MIT, it's wildly to BDSM. Are they really? Why are geeks and Aspies and to BDSM, somebody said, lots of rules. What's an Aspie? Asperger's people. Right. Lots of rules. They like that? They like, they love rules. 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 you know, 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 isn't the best interest of the shareholders, even if it's an absolutely not in the best interest of the United States. This is what Ralph Garmory, 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, 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 Corona vilers, 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 it. 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— Do you ever hear 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 rationalize. You were going to say? 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. Are you going back to, like, depression-era thinking? Well, not depression-era thinking. It's like, why can't things be sustainable? 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. Right. 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 weird way, the planned obsolescence is like fake growth. It means that we're going to rebuy our phones as if they were now highly innovative. So there's like a weird way in which we become dependent on nonsense.