Scientist Lex Fridman Promotes Mask Wearing | Joe Rogan

Hello Lex. You might be wondering why, what I'm wearing on my face. I'm not wondering. No? No. It's coronavirus time. Everybody out there is wearing a mask. So I'm assuming that's what you're wearing on your face. Yeah. So this is a homemade mask. Takes 30 seconds to make. 30 seconds. Did you time yourself? I don't know. If you have a bra, can you like cut a cup and like strap tie it on? That would work, right? But there's no, yes. Probably, but it probably, there, as far as I'm aware, there's no scientific study of how effective bras are at filtering. How effective is that thing? So there is, I'm glad you asked, Joe. So I'm a part of this, and I'll take this off in a few minutes. I just want to, one, I want to talk about some of the science and two, I want to remove some of the stigma that's around masks. So I'm part of this group of scientists that have put together a survey paper showing that masks work. And it started as a movement called Masks Fall, hashtag, in the Czech Republic, that essentially one of the critical components of stopping the spread of coronavirus is everybody has to wear masks. And the science is twofold. So I mean, I need to break this apart, but you're going to take the mask off eventually, right? Yeah. So let's just tell you now so I can hear you because there's an audio. You can't hear this so much better. Oh, yeah. Nice. So it's like taking a condom off the before and after. So you probably shouldn't be wearing a mask when you're doing podcasts. Definitely not. But everywhere else. Yes. So when you're going out to the grocery store, you should wear a mask everywhere. Everywhere. And that's OK. So some some questions do homemade masks work. So there's currently a shortage of N95 respirator masks, which should be exclusively used as PPE, personal protective equipment by health care workers. OK, there's also a shortage of surgical masks, which are these non-vowen fabric masks that work very well for the thing I'm talking about. But because there's a shortage of them, we should not be buying them and should be saving them for health care workers. And then the open question was whether homemade masks like the one I just described work to stop as a filtration mechanism. This is the confusing thing for the individual centric society that we live in. Masks are the most what are they actually effective for? What they're effective for is to prevent me, if I'm infected, asymptomatic from spreading the infection to you. So that's where the movement of masks for all started, which is your mask protects me. My mask protects you. And the idea there is is not I'm not protecting. I'm not creating a wall from the rest of society. I am contributing to the sort of the bigger aggregate picture of it by not allowing the infection to spread. So masks is masks allow you to reduce that transmission rate to one to below one. So allowing you to decrease the transmission rate while also allowing people to be in public. So I mean, how long do you think it's going to take before businesses are up and running again? I know Wuhan is back up in business again, but there's a lot of criticism about that. And they're also saying they're seeing new cases. I think the question I think it can be sooner than we think if we do the following things. So one, I'd hate to linger on this and love to talk to you. You talk about masks again. Well, it's funny, but I know for a fact you're going to make fun of me just like I'll make fun of you right back for loving fanny packs. But just like fanny packs are exceptionally functional to carry on the things you need, masks will be masks are required to slow the spread of this infection. Listen, I'm not an anti-mask person. And like one of the things that to do is you have to start getting governors, so politicians to wear them. Are President Trump to wear them? Well, this is the Boris Johnson question, right? Because that guy, not only was he not wearing masks, but he was shaking hands. And he was talking about it pretty openly. And now he's in intensive care. If he dies, that will be the biggest wake up call for everyone. Yeah. I mean, I hope he doesn't die, but God damn, people are so mean over there. I don't know his policies. I don't know. I haven't been in England in a long time. I don't know how they feel about him. But fuck people. Some people hate him. They're saying things like they were. They're hoping he dies. They hope he suffers and dies. I've read Twitter Andrew Doyle, Andrew Boyle, rather. The guy who wrote woke to Tiana McGrath. Yeah. But it was actually his own personal account. He published some of the tweets that people have written about. We don't have to put it up there. I don't want to up these people's signal, but it's just so heartless. So yeah, that's masks. But testing, really, the big one is, there's three things. Masks, besides like washing hands and social distancing, all that stuff. Masks, testing, and contact tracing. So contact tracing. So this is great. Let's talk about this. First of all, I'm going to keep... We get it, masks. We get it. We don't get it. We don't get it. Have you been wearing masks? Do you know how weird it is? Like, societally for us, it's a weird step to take. I don't know what... It's like an open question. What does it take to do that? No, it's weird. It's really weird. So you can't see the emotional expression of the people. You can't... There's a strange effect to it. And then the other effect is, as an individualistic society, you're wearing the mask, not to protect yourself but to protect others. And that's a weird thing for us to do. I don't think people are thinking that. I think they think they're protecting themselves. Well, you can sort of delude them or you can tell them the truth. That this... I mean, there's a nice positive aspect to it. It's just me wearing a mask says, I care about not getting you sick. Yes. That's a really powerful social signal for when you're hanging out with people. I think there's so much ignorance going on though. I don't think people wear... There's a large percentage of people, this is my assumption, that are wearing that mask that are not wearing it because they think they're going to protect other people. They're worried about getting it. Yeah. And I don't think... I mean, this is what the WHO and the CDC... This is where I hate what they're doing, which is sort of there's truth and that there is ideas of how the truth will be misinterpreted by the public. And so you shouldn't tell people the truth. So there's a kind of sense like the WHO and CDC have said that masks don't work, for example. Or they said that we shouldn't be wearing masks, we should save them for the healthcare workers. Well, we have to be honest about what the timeline, the WHO, what they've said. They're wrong about so much of it. They were initially saying that you couldn't transfer it from person to person. I mean, this is just in the beginning of the year. I mean, Dan Crenshaw went over the timeline of all the things that were wrong about what the World Health Organization said on the podcast yesterday. That's terrifying stuff. And obviously newspapers were going off of that information and they were printing misleading stuff as well. And the president didn't know. No one knew. The whole thing is very weird. If you're going based on what they were saying, it didn't look like it was going to be nearly as bad as it is. And then everyone has had to make adjustments. I'm actually the one, like I'm so, I'm so freaked out about the loss of life and the loss of jobs and how people are getting, it's really weird. Everything about it is weird. It's weird in our lifetime to be a part of something that's just affecting the entire world like this. But I've gotten a lot of messages from friends that are coordinated with their families. They're like, we've never been closer. And then we realize that we're in this together because we realize that during these crazy times you realize what is important, love, that silly little word you were talking about, love and community and friendship, like my neighbors. Everyone's so nice. Everyone's waving now and everyone's like saying hi and talking from over the side of the yard and how's everything? You guys all right? Need anything? We're right here. There's a lot of this like comfort and warmth that I think I experienced a little bit of that post 9-11 where people get shocked. They get shook up and then they realize what matters. Yeah, that's one of the things I don't like about masks is it feels like you're protecting yourself from, like you're removing yourself from the community. There's that look and- Like get away from me dirty people. Yeah, get away from me. So the germaphobe kind of idea. That's not what they are supposed to represent, but that I'm sitting here on the science that says we have to all wear them. And then thinking like how's that going to change interactions?