Population Geneticist Spencer Wells on Why Coronavirus Will Reshape Society More Than We Think

Vance Crowe [00:00:02] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast. Spencer Wells, welcome back to the podcast.

Spencer Wells [00:00:12] It's good to talk to you again, Vance. It's, it's been a week or so and a lot of shit has happened in the meantime.

Vance Crowe [00:00:20] So you are in Indonesia, where are you right now?

Spencer Wells [00:00:24] I'm in Lombok, Indonesia. So if you know Indonesian geography, 17,000 Islands Long Archipelago, it's the fourth most populous nation in the world, and Lombok is the island just to the east of Bali, if anybody's ever been there on, on vacation. So we are just across the strai, we look across every evening at Sunset and we see the sun going down over Gunnan Agon, which is the large volcano to the northern part of, of Bali. So that's where we are.

Vance Crowe [00:00:58] So last time we spoke, everything was hypothetical, not everything, but there were a lot of lockdowns happening. People were moving into shelter in place in a big way. And you were the first person that I had spoken with that had compared Coronavirus to the Black Plague. Now a week and a half in, do you still think of it in those stark of terms now that we've seen the data in the world?

Spencer Wells [00:01:24] Yeah, I, I I do. I think that the data has really borne that, that prediction out, unfortunately. And listen, I I just wanna go on the record is saying, I don't take pleasure in making these negative, scary prognostications. I want the best for everybody. And the reason I am so active on social media, on Twitter in particular about all of this stuff is because I want people to be able to save themselves, you know? And so, you know, the UK Central Bank said that this is going to be the worst downturn, not since the depression, but since the dawn of the industrial era 300 years ago. You know, it's what,

Vance Crowe [00:02:08] When did they say that? Like, I, one of the things that I love about your Twitter feed is that it is international. You know, last time when we were talking, you said something to the effect of, the Americans are just reading American news and that American News is only focused on America. And I, it dawned on me that you were right. I thought I had this really global perspective, so I started trying to, to dice in international news. But the thing that you're talking about with the European Central Bank or the Bank of England, like none of that is getting through as far as my media.

Spencer Wells [00:02:42] I know. I mean, listen, if you just follow the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, those are my two primary US news sources. You're getting, you know, a, a little bit of the, the picture, but you're not getting the whole picture. And even the story in the US is not being told properly, I think in some of those news sources. I, you know, those of us who are political centrists realize that the New York Times is pretty far to the left, and the Wall Street Journal is pretty far to the right. And so they have their own takes on things and, you know, so to get a more rational view, like check out the Straits Times the newspaper of record in Singapore, Singapore is arguably the best governed country in the fricking world. And their newspaper is amazing. Like they have stories on every country in the world about this whole thing.

Vance Crowe [00:03:34] So gimme the lay of the land. It is April 22nd, April 23rd. It's Thursday, April 23rd. It's

Spencer Wells [00:03:42] Getting a ramathan here in the largest is Islamic Muslim country in, in the world in Indonesia. The sun went down about three hours ago, and there was the call to prayer. And so we are well into Ramadan now, which is gonna change the whole complexion of this in the Islamic world. Not only here, but obviously in India and Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Middle East and, and other places. Yeah. So it's, it's the evening of the 23rd here.

Vance Crowe [00:04:16] So I lived with an Afghani man during Ramadan before I've, I've spent quite a bit of time with people from the Middle East. For people that don't know, why does Ramadan shift the, the way that people will interact or be a big deal with regards to this virus?

Spencer Wells [00:04:34] Well, so the main thing with Ramadan is it, it's like lent in Christianity. So, but, but they take it much more seriously in Islam. And so you cannot eat or drink water. Like you can't drink alcohol, of course, if you're a Muslim, but you can't eat or drink water or any liquid from sunup to sundown every day. And in a tropical country, you know, we're, we are hitting temperatures now, we're into the dry season, it's 95 during the day, and the heat index is like 105. People basically just kind of lie around at home between sunup and sundown. And then they have these amazing feasts in the evening, the, the, the iftars. And so that's their opportunity to actually eat and drink for the, the whole day. But it changes the way society works. I mean, you know, every, everything shuts down. Like businesses open later, they shut down earlier, they may not be open at all in addition to what's going on with the coronavirus. So it's, it's, you know, it's really interesting to witness. I'm not a Muslim obviously, but it's, it's fascinating to me as a student of history and, and world cultures.

Vance Crowe [00:05:49] And does that mean they'll be more socially distant or less socially distant? Because it was, my recollection is a very family time, a very like, bring together your neighbors and guests. Will that, will that be something they'll be pulled to do

Spencer Wells [00:06:02] More socially distant, you know, again, Indonesia, it's interesting. So since we last spoke about a week ago, Indonesia has really kind of not on a national level, you know, this is a big country as we talked about, and it's got this really complicated history of political violence and, you know, military cos and things like that. You know, the, the President Jacobi has done, I think a decent job, not a great job of managing the COVID outbreak so far. But essentially what has happened is that regions, you know, little provinces have been left to their own to make their own decisions. And they've all uniformly like instituted mask regulations. You have to, you know, when we live in a, a development that is mostly full of expats, we have Australians on one side, Germans on the other, our little compound here. And, you know, to come in, you have to have your temperature taken and you have to be wearing a mask and you have to wash your hands with hand sanitizer. They're doing a pretty good job. So it's, it's pretty decentralized right here in Indonesia, but I think they're doing a very good job.

Vance Crowe [00:07:23] So in the United States, people are watching that. The death rates that they thought were going to happen, they thought the hospitals would be overrun, that they would be, there would be a shortage of body bags and that it would be absolute catastrophe. And that when they saw what was going on in New York, that kind of shocked them, you know, the amount of, of sirens they could hear on the news. But today they don't see their local area looking like that. And so their perception is the models were wrong, it's not as deadly as we thought. Let's go ahead and open up the economy. You, Spencer Wells are a population geneticist and a world traveler who's been all over the world. How does that sound to you as Americans are saying, pushing to open up the economy?

Spencer Wells [00:08:06] It sounds absolutely insane. Like follow my Twitter feed again, at SP Wells, I posted, you know, I post this every day, the linear chart of number of confirmed cases around the world and the rest of the world is flattening the curve as they say. Although that's not good because we will probably have additional waves of infection. And so, you know, it's good for now, but it's not necessarily the solution, but the US is still rising exponentially. It's, it's not going down. And so the idea of reopening the country right now, to me is insane. Again, I've said this, I think I said it on our show, I've certainly said it on other podcasts I've done, you can't spend money when you are dead, you know, so like the desire to reopen the economy, I get it. Okay. Again, I'm a small business owner, I wanna reopen the economy as well, but you can't spend that money if you're dead.

Vance Crowe [00:09:06] What are happening to your businesses right now? The, you, you have a nightclub, you have a genetics company. How are your businesses fearing?

Spencer Wells [00:09:14] Well, so our genetics company, we are just about to relaunch as a 5 0 1 C3. We were granted that status last fall. So we're a nonprofit now. So we've, you know, essentially dumped all of the assets, the, you know, knowledge, the people, et cetera, into the nonprofit. And we're a think tank now. And so that's in good shape. We actually have some partnerships that we'll be announcing later this spring in terms of the nightclub, you know, we're, we're doing okay, like Antone's is an icon in the Austin scene and people want to support it. They wanna support the musicians, they wanna support the staff. And so we are maintaining our salaried staff and trying to keep everybody employed and, you know, safe that, you know, we, we have Antone's radio, so if you go to antone's dot com, like you'll see announcements about every show we have recorded over the last five years, three years worth of, or sorry, 300 high definition sound recordings. And we're basically playing them live on Facebook every Friday night at 8:00 PM Austin time. You know, this is a really interesting time because it, it's, it's a challenge being a business owner, but it also presents amazing opportunities for people who can innovate. And that's what we're trying to do.

Vance Crowe [00:10:38] Yeah, that's one of the things. So after you told me that this was like the Black Plague, I want to just give you a description of how I responded to that. So we left our interview and I posted it as quickly as I could. And then I went upstairs and my wife and I made the decision that we were going to order everything that we thought we would need for the pregnancy that might be difficult to get. And so good we ordered cribs and, and car seat and anything that we thought might have trouble getting through the borders or being transported. And then we, then we slowed down, you know, we, we got everything that we needed and then started being more patient. I noticed that a bunch of my science friends and family members reacted really positive to me putting that out there, because I think up until I had spoken with you, they had thought that I was not very clear or not very taking it as seriously as they were, even though I was bunkered in my house. But then I went to look up the Black Plague and that's where you're talking about. Yeah.

Spencer Wells [00:11:41] So what did you discover about the Black Plague bands?

Vance Crowe [00:11:44] So there's downsides and upside that

Spencer Wells [00:11:47] It lasted over two centuries.

Vance Crowe [00:11:49] So this, this is, this is an interesting thing that, that the first round of Major Black Plague, as far as I have heard, lasted about two years. And it really leveled the entire playing field. It took the aristocracy and the peasants and it killed everybody equally. And once it got into your town or community, it made it so you weren't really able to travel. You couldn't just hop up and go to another town. People wouldn't accept you. It also wiped out 25% of the population or more, depending on who you talk to and, and what your boundaries are on that. No one's calling for that level of death. The,

Spencer Wells [00:12:27] The last major outbreak was in London in 1666, which was a couple of centuries after it first broke out in the 13th century. Interesting that it's 6, 6, 6. I won't go into biblical allegories, but it's, you know, it's, it's fascinating that those numbers pop up from time to time in various places. But yeah, so over the course of the entire Black Plague pandemic in Europe, around half of Europeans were killed. They died. But coming out of that, we have the Renaissance. And so this is my hope with, with what's going on now, is that like this, these are really difficult times and nobody wants to be where we are right now, but the hope for the future is that we come out of this stronger, we come out of this with more resolution about what's important in life and a resolution to rebuild society in a more positive way, the way they didn't.

Vance Crowe [00:13:32] But just to stop you, like you really think that level of death is possible in the US from Coronavirus?

Spencer Wells [00:13:38] No, no, no, no. We're, we're not gonna see 50% killed. Absolutely not. You know, this is the first wave that's going through right now. The second wave, as you know, the CC director said yesterday could be more deadly. I think it probably will be more deadly. It'll come in the fall, you know, we're gonna go through a series of waves, but nowhere near 50% of the population will die. This is not a killer on the level of Ebola and Black Plague. This is, you know, it's worse than the worst seasonal flu we've ever experienced. But the important thing is that it is disrupting society in a way that nobody has ever experienced in recent historical memory. I'm not even talking about the 1918 pandemic, like whatever that, that's a sidebar. This is, this is way more intense in terms of social destruction and economic destruction. And that is, you know, that's what is most interesting to me now. Because like, listen, most people who get this, they're not gonna die. Most people aren't even symptomatic, you know, from the, the serological studies that are being done now on large scales in Southern California, Germany, and places like that, you know, so this is not a major killer like Ebola or Black Plague, but it is utterly disruptive to the entire social order of the world. And, you know, we're all seeing that. And is that

Vance Crowe [00:15:08] Because of the way that people reacted? Like, is, was there any way to stop the amount of social disruption that there is right now? No. Or it was inevitable?

Spencer Wells [00:15:17] No, no, no. Because when you have a new pandemic that erupts like this, especially one that's mutating rapidly as, as the virus is, which is why it's gonna be so difficult to develop a vaccine, I would argue impossible in the near term, at least, you know, for the next five or 10 years. But, you know, with a new virus, with a new zoonotic outbreak like this, like you don't know what's gonna happen. And that's why everybody has to lock down. And that's why people are freaking out justifiably like, you don't know if it's the next black plague. You don't know if this is the next HIV epidemic or Ebola or whatever the hell it is. I mean, and the things we're discovering about the, the way this virus attacks our biology attacks our brains. You know, if you're male, it attacks your testicles and may make you infertile. I mean, the stuff that's coming out is just crazy. And so of course no one wants to catch this, but it's not as big a killer as these other things. So I would argue that the fear of this is far greater and you know, therefore the social impact is far greater than the actual, you know, mortality rate.

Vance Crowe [00:16:29] So let's talk about this mutation of the virus. This is something that I heard early on, and then it kind of went away. And now I'm hearing people talk about there are different strains, some are more deadly than others. In fact, I think I heard that from you. So how should we think about how this virus mutates and if there'll be multiple coronaviruses?

Spencer Wells [00:16:48] Well, so there, there is a website that is actually cataloging the known genetic sequences of the virus. And most of those, you know, they were sampled early on. The way things happen in any rapidly expanding population is that mutations kind of fan out. So you get mutations on mutations on mutations, and you get this kind of tree that kind of fans out like that based on mutational differences. If the rate of asymptomatic infection is as high as I think it is in, as the early data shows that it is, you know, I've said that there could be a billion people infected worldwide by the end of the summer. A billion people infected with an RNA virus means that the number of possible genetic variants in that viral genome is going to be enormous. Like, no, I mean, what we are seeing right now from the lyes of viral genome variation is literally a tiny little ice cube on the edge of a massive iceberg. And we don't know how big that iceberg is, but we, we have a sense that it's really scary and we're in the Titanic and we're about to hit it.

Vance Crowe [00:18:10] Good lord, man. You have a way with I I, I think with articulating the danger of it, because the biggest challenge is right now, I wake up in St. Louis, Missouri, I look out the window, it's bright, it's sunny, I can go outside and exercise, I can get some work done. It doesn't seem to be that crazy to me. And then I watch people talking about the fact that they're running outta money or that they're afraid they're gonna have to go stand in food lines. Absolutely. So absolutely the fear of this iceberg relative to friends losing their jobs, people accepting layoffs is, you know, I think irrational person says, are we sure? Go ahead.

Spencer Wells [00:18:49] That heterogeneity in people's experiences, that is what will lead to bad decision making, in my opinion, if we don't have clear direction from the very top that understands exactly how serious this is to the most vulnerable people in the country, one of the things to come out of all of the, the infections in New York is that we know that obesity is the major factor in whether people have to be hospitalized. America's approaching 50% obesity right now, you know, this year we're supposed to hit something close to 50%. The entire country is a simmering cauldron of susceptibility to, you know, hospital realizable infections from this thing. But on the other hand, like you said, you know, young people, healthy people who are, you know, fit and, you know, have the right genetic makeup. And that's another component of it. You know, you're like, why can't we get back to work? And this is what I want. I mean, this is, this is part of a strategy that I'm trying to build out that I'm writing up for a publication in the US is, you know, everybody needs to get back to work. We want to get back to work, we have to do it smartly. So how, how do we create risk pools? So the people in the high risk pools? No, you're locked down, essentially, in my opinion these days, if you're over 60, you're retired, you can't come outta hiding.

Spencer Wells [00:20:23] Like you're, you can't go back to work again if you're over 60,

Vance Crowe [00:20:27] That that will be so devastating to the American economy that it is unspeakable

Spencer Wells [00:20:32] It, it'll, it will. So we have to change the way the economy works. But if you are a healthy person with the right genetic risk profile in your twenties or thirties, absolutely. Get back out there. Start up the economy again. Man,

Vance Crowe [00:20:46] You know what this is, this may sound crazy. One of the, the things that happened with the Black plague is that the aristocracy, the old hierarchy system got leveled in some ways because the labor pool, they were able to, it used to be you were tied to the land and part of the royalty said, you go work for this guy and you don't really have a choice. This is

Spencer Wells [00:21:04] One of the dawn of the Renaissance that led into the industrial revolution. I mean, land became less important after that, that happened. And, you know, workers could basically demand their own salaries. The, the world became much richer.

Vance Crowe [00:21:18] Yeah, four times as as much they were able to charge for their days. So they were able to do a regular day's work and get three to four times worth of pay for it. So for the people that survived and the people that were able to move around and, and find those working arrangements, it, it was the flipping of the order that many people in society have been calling for for a long time. I mean, like, there's a reason that okay, boomer language gets in there and it's because of a generation thinking the people older than us are holding us back. And you're suggesting that's actually the only way to hold back the tide is to, is to keep the 60 year olds out and let the young people start taking over big swats of the economy.

Spencer Wells [00:21:57] Do you have grandparents who are alive?

Vance Crowe [00:22:01] Not on my side, no.

Spencer Wells [00:22:03] What about parents? How old?

Vance Crowe [00:22:05] My dad is 78. So my mother

Spencer Wells [00:22:08] Is

Vance Crowe [00:22:08] 68, so

Spencer Wells [00:22:08] My 73, she's gonna be 74 this year, and she hasn't been out of her house for six weeks. And I've told her like, you may never leave that house again during your lifetime. That's how serious this is,

Vance Crowe [00:22:25] Spencer, man, you, you are out there on the edge as far as my world. What you are saying is so contrary to what people think is possible, that they're either pulling their trucks over to the side of the road and calling their parents to tell them how dangerous it is, or they're laughing because they think that you're a crazy person.

Spencer Wells [00:22:47] And again, it's because of the heterogeneity and outcomes, because we don't completely understand everything about what affects that. If you're infected, you know, the majority of people seem to be asymptomatic, okay? So it's easy to pass this off as a common cold for those people. Other people, healthy triathletes in their mid twenties die within days until we understand why that happens. It's scary as f

Vance Crowe [00:23:17] And, and it's, and you think it's more scary than people getting in their cars and driving into work and the number of car accidents and the flu and the random death that happens just in the world.

Spencer Wells [00:23:27] Every decision that is made from here on out has to be based on science and reason. It has to be based on facts and data. You cannot make decisions based on economic desire or politics that will kill people.

Vance Crowe [00:23:41] You know, that's an interesting way to put it about economic desires, because that's one of the challenges that I've, I've thought of, and this may just be wordplay, but we're not really in a fight between saving lives and the economy, because economics is the study of how do we disperse scarce resources. So no matter what this is on trying to protect people, the allocation of scarce resources is what we're trying to figure out. And I look at it and say, if you convince all of the people working in meat plants to stop going to meat plants because they're getting coronavirus, meat is going to stop in the United States.

Spencer Wells [00:24:22] Yeah. Listen, again, I, I am not advocating a shutdown of the US economy because I'm a leftist because I hate America. Like I want America to go back to work as soon as possible as well. It would benefit me, but it's also like better for the world and it's better for every American who, who lives within the confines of the, the states. You know, the reason I'm so worried is because I think it's going to be worse given how much we don't know about this virus, and given what we don't know about the next wave. And remember the 1918 pandemic, the flu pandemic, it was worse in the second wave. Given how much we don't know right now, reopening the economy, I worry not only will it kill a lot of people, not only will it not build up herd immunity, because there's a lot of work that's coming out now showing that humans don't retain long-term immunity to this virus. And they can be reinfected just like the flu, just like the flu. Just like the flu. So that's not new, but it's just, you know, come on, let's figure out the science before, like, we're only a month into this really, six weeks into it at most, depending on where you're, you're living, let's figure out the parameters before we make crazy decisions. That's all I'm saying.

Vance Crowe [00:25:50] So Spencer, you are a world traveler, in fact, probably one of the, one of the great world travelers alive today. You've traveled all, if there is a fantastic documentary you've done called The Journey of Man, and you go up to the Arctic Circle, you're down in Namibia, you are in Australia, you have been a person that has traveled widely and freely. You've used your ability to move around the world to an extreme degree. Do you imagine that you will be able to go back to those places in your lifetime? What does this mean for a guy like you?

Spencer Wells [00:26:25] It's gonna change a lot. I feel like travel is in the process of shifting back to the way it was when I was a child. So going back to the 1970s when I took my first Southwest Airlines flight, I dressed up in my Sunday polyester suit with a tie, and I flew from Lubbock, Texas to Dallas Love Field on Southwest Airlines. I think it was like 1976 or something, early days of Southwest Airlines. But you know, people used to dress up, travel used to be a, a real luxury. And I feel like that's what we're moving back to. I feel like business travel simply to do IRL chats with people that's gonna go away. Like I, I feel like we're all moving to like virtual meetings and so on and you know, so

Vance Crowe [00:27:22] I've been shocked by how much I could do. I used to believe very firmly, you can only do this stuff live and in person. And I used to despise video chats, like, why do you wanna look at me while we're talking? Dude, listen,

Spencer Wells [00:27:33] I I'm sitting it, it is nine 30 at night on a remote island in freaking Indonesia, and you and I are having a live chat being video recorded that's gonna go out on the internet so that thousands of people can see it. The world is different now. I mean, and thank God, like I listen to Spotify all day every day and you know, thank God I can stream that music. You know, it's, it's awesome. We, we watch Netflix at night, you know, so the world has changed a lot because of the internet, but in terms of like in real life travel, I feel like a lot of the middle is gonna be carved out. I feel like cruises, you know, Disney cruises and whatever else it might be, those are, those are gonna go away. I mean, do you know anybody who's booking a cruise right now?

Vance Crowe [00:28:23] No. I can you imagine? I I, I've always been surprised about that even after Norovirus. I used to be surprised about this. So you have, last time we spoke, you had a very insightful indicator for how does the world, how does corporate America think about Coronavirus? And you kind of framed it as the Disney index, I think basically saying these are the people that are in business to have entertainment, to bring people together where it is joyous. If you watch what their behavior is, you can tell how corporate America thinks of this disease. Do you still agree with that index?

Spencer Wells [00:29:00] Absolutely, yeah. I mean, watch, watch what is gonna happen with Disney. I mean, we're now about two weeks out from their quarterly earnings call. It's gonna be a blood bath. I mean, you, you, I, the, the thing about large corporations is they don't release information that openly until they have to. But everything that's coming out, 75,000 people laid off at the theme parks and senior executives taking pay cuts and complaining about it. Like it's gonna be really scary. And this is just the beginning of it. Like, they're not gonna be reopening theme parks on June 1st if you believe that you are delusional. And, and they know that, they know that as well. They're trying to project confidence. That's what corporate leaders and government leaders have to do. They have to project confidence, but you know, inside the machine they know how long this is gonna last. It's, it's scary.

Vance Crowe [00:30:00] So Naval Ravikant, who is a VC investor, or I don't know if you know naval, but he had a tweet yesterday that went quite viral, and he basically said, the economy will reopen when white collar people start losing their jobs. What do you think about that

Spencer Wells [00:30:17] White collar people are already losing their jobs? Listen, white collar people were losing their jobs before this ever happened. I mean, do you know that the value of a jd, a law degree has gone down enormously in the last 10 years? You know, you probably read about this, but, you know, associates at major law firms being replaced by ai, this is, this is a major issue in America. Doctors, you know, arguably AI can do a better job of reading radiographs than physicians can. You know, I think this, what what the virus is doing is it's serving as an accelerant to things that were happening in society more broadly anyway. And you know, the one of the things that I think the government's gonna have to step up and, you know, take on is, is UBI universal basic income, really the solution in the future? Because it might be, honestly, like if people are starving to death and rioting in the streets, maybe it's better to pay everybody $2,000 a month just so they can buy food and not like fucking freak out, which is what's gonna happen if we don't do something like that,

Vance Crowe [00:31:34] Man, that is literally the scariest thing that you could say to me is that UBI, because I see that as the obvious step towards communism. And so I see that and think, I I'm into, I who lacks,

Spencer Wells [00:31:48] I, I've, I've lived in the former Soviet Union, it's a shit hole. Okay? I don't want to go there. But society is like, we are heading back toward 1917 right now, not 1918 with the flu pandemic 1917 with the communist revolution. That is where things are headed right now. So, and

Vance Crowe [00:32:09] I, like right now, I had, I interviewed a guy last night. I, I interviewed a guy last night who runs a business and he was talking about how much pressure there was on his employees from his employees to lay them off because they could make more money on unemployment than they have ever made before. And they were talking about like, I now have thousands of dollars in my bank account. I've never had this much money before. And he's saying, look, if my guys get laid off, the economy still kind of goes, but no more fiber. Like, there's a whole bunch of things that don't happen. But if other companies like sewage treatment just shut down, we're talking about like, people disease will spread on a scale that we've never seen before. So I fear this idea of incentivizing people not to work. And and I say that while not having to go out into the economy, I,

Spencer Wells [00:33:05] I do too. Listen, societies go through stages in their life cycles and Europe is in its old age, okay? So something like UBI makes a lot of sense in a place like Europe or Japan, which is also in its old age. The United States has always been a young striving country where entrepreneurship and youth and new ideas have been valued. And UBI will destroy that. It will, it, it, it just will like, it, you can't take the same concept and apply it equally to all societies. The US is inherently a different society. Will it get to the point where we need UBI possibly, but I mean, this is beyond my ability as kind of a amateur economist slash sociologist. But I'm just like, you know, I, I know history and I, I know that UBI is not right for the us not right now. It might be in the future, but it's, it's not right for the US at the moment.

Vance Crowe [00:34:13] How are you seeing other countries deal with this, both good and bad that we might not be seeing because we're in the us focused on US media?

Spencer Wells [00:34:24] The main thing that I'm noticing is this really weird disconnect between what we predicted at the beginning of this pandemic, which was, poor countries in the tropics were gonna be hit really hard and rich countries in the, the, the north, you know, in Europe and America, we're gonna be better able to deal with it. In fact, it's been the exact opposite. And I think there are interesting factors that come into play there, and I'm exploring some of them. I'm looking at the correlation between peanut allergies and confirmed infections and so on. IE people who grow up poor are exposed to more antigens and their immune systems are healthier and maybe they're better able to fight it off. We know from Chinese data and you know, I'm sure everybody is suspicious as I am of a lot of the Chinese data that's coming up. But you know, if you live your life outside in a tropical breeze the way we do here in Indonesia, you're 18 times less likely to catch it from someone who's standing next to you than if you're in a cubicle in an office space. I, I think those, those things are really interesting because essentially what if they're true? It means the virus is kind of tailored to kill people in the rich northern world, IE Europe and America.

Vance Crowe [00:35:51] In addition to that, they're killing the, the heavyset diabetes people in the

Spencer Wells [00:35:55] World.

Vance Crowe [00:35:55] Yes. And the older people

Spencer Wells [00:35:57] Addition to the obesity predisposition and diabetics and, and everything else. You know, I think this is part of a once every few centuries reset from the western hegemony, European American geopolitical and economic superiority moving back into Asia, down to the east and the south. It's something that's been happening for a while. The Economist has done charts on this and you know, I, I've read The Economist since I was 20 years old. You know, it, I feel like Asia is just going to come out of this smelling better than Europe and America will.

Vance Crowe [00:36:40] So are you moving investments from America into the Asian markets? I've

Spencer Wells [00:36:45] Done it. I've already done it.

Vance Crowe [00:36:47] Wow.

Spencer Wells [00:36:49] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:36:50] You know, it's, this has been a tough call for me because I, you know, you've gotta make decisions and you could make a decision to fill up your freezer with meat, you know, have a tangible asset that you can eat. You could say, well, I think the US is the strongest naval power and ultimately shipping comes down to Navy, so I'm gonna bring it back to the us. You could say, I'm just gonna take money off of the table right now because the stock market seems to have held, like, there just seems to be so many options and depending on who I talk to, can,

Spencer Wells [00:37:19] Can I just say again, I am not beating up on the us My earliest male wells ancestor, spelled with a second E-W-E-L-L-E-S was one of the first governors of Connecticut in the 1650s. Okay. One of his descendants founded Wells Fargo and American Express. My family have been brigadier generals. They've graduated from West Point, they died fighting off Nazis in Monte Casino in Italy. My wife's family, she's Morse. So her great-great-great-great, great-great-great uncle created the Morse code. And her great-great grandfather founded Pebble Beach and developed the entire Monterey Peninsula. We have a huge familial investment in making the US great. Okay. We love the United States. I am very unhappy with the choices that are being made by our leaders right now.

Vance Crowe [00:38:20] Tell me more this, I mean, like, I agree, I saw your tweet thread on that, and I mean, you're a, a genealogist and, and a population geneticist, so you do care about family lines quite a bit. And I thought that was a very interesting way to show like, I love it, but now I have, I'm gonna criticize it.

Spencer Wells [00:38:37] It's, it's, we, we have to separate love of America from love of politicians and we have poor choices in office right now. You could argue that at a different time in, in history, these politicians might be good choices. I personally don't think they are, but that's, that's debatable. But at this point in history, dealing with this big a crisis, the biggest crisis that this country has ever encountered, probably greater than the Civil War, okay? We do not have the right leaders making the right decisions. And that's all I'm saying.

Vance Crowe [00:39:15] I, I mean, I, I have to agree with you and I try and avoid talking about politics because as soon as somebody thinks they know who you voted for, then all of a sudden they, they write you off. But I listened to a guy named Eric Weinstein who has this new podcast called The Portal, and he described in great detail how for the last 40 years we've selected presidents based on some other characteristic than dealing with war, some other characteristic than existential pressure because we've had it so good that it's that our stability that we've hired actors and the actors are pretending to deal with problems.

Spencer Wells [00:39:51] What do you think the greatest generation was so great? Because they lived through the Great Depression as children, and then they went off and fought in World War II as a team, as a single United States unit fighting off fascism, an existential crisis. As you say, we haven't had anything like that. But when they came back from both of those two things, they created the greatest country the world has ever known. The United States from 1950 to about 1970 was literally the greatest country in the history of the world. And I, I lament the loss of that as I'm sure many of your listeners do.

Vance Crowe [00:40:29] And in truth, like it would be really great right now if our senators, for example, were statesmen and they were, they were actual people that have developed things in the world, business people that understand how things work, they go for a little while into office, they put in their political position and then they come out. But we haven't had to have that, right? We, we've, we've selected for a different pressure and hopefully in the new coronavirus world where only certain people can work and other people can't. You start seeing real leaders pop up and say, I'm willing to take risks and I'm willing to be smart, and I'm willing to forego economic decisions in the short term for something over the long term.

Spencer Wells [00:41:10] That, that's the hope is that we create a new renaissance, you know? And, and I think it will happen. I I, you know, I I am long term very hopeful about the us I feel like, you know, America stands for something that really matters to everyone around the world. It it stands for something that's never existed anywhere else in the history of the, the planet. And you know, it's been misled for a while now, and I feel like it's gonna come back from that eventually, but it's gonna be a painful, slow process. And there's a lot of stuff we have to just, you know, shove aside and, and get rid of.

Vance Crowe [00:41:50] Do you think it matters that, so right now there is a, a movement talking about how the Chinese found out there was coronavirus, they locked it down so people couldn't travel within the country, but they started sending hundreds of thousands of people ultimately to the United States and Europe. Was that, is that, does that matter because some people are perceiving that as an attack that China did, or is this all blaming, how should we think about this?

Spencer Wells [00:42:16] I, I, I don't think it's intact now. There's a lot of interesting data that's come out about the Wuhan virology lab and whether this could have escaped from the lab. I think it's entirely possible that this could have been a virus they were studying in the lab and they didn't have proper, you know, biosafety lab, VSL, you know, precautions in place. But it only accelerated something that was gonna happen naturally anyway. I mean, we saw sars, we saw Mers, like there's been a history of coronaviruses emerging from, you know, zoonotic sources, something like this was gonna happen. Everybody knew that. Everybody who followed emerging diseases knew that this was gonna happen. You know, this is what is so bizarre to me. You know, Nassim Tala and I both talked about this is not a black swan, this is a white swan. You know, you, you, one of your, I think your most popular YouTube post of all time is, is that excerpt where I talk about this is not a black swan event, this is a white swan event. We, if you willingly choose to ignore risk, then you're gonna be bitten in the ass. Honestly.

Vance Crowe [00:43:29] So since that posting where the, we talked about the, it's a white swan and not a, a black swan. A guy came on to talk about the fact that he has stopped trucking hogs to the meat processing plant. He was fired from his job, which means to him, if multiple plants do that, you're gonna have farmers going out to their hog barns because they can't process them shooting the pigs and burying them in mass graves. And that's the thing that people look at and say, that's why there's this divide here. And, and like, they aren't even sitting there saying, my economic hopes, they're saying, are we do, are we really prepared to do mass graves of pigs in, in the Midwest?

Spencer Wells [00:44:11] So I, I have, you know, somewhat jokingly called this the revenge of the peasants. I think people who farm the land have chickens, hogs on small farms could feed themselves and their family are gonna be the richest people in this whole thing. You know, that that's where true wealth lies. And it's, it really comes back to basics. It's like, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like, okay, shelter, food, water, you know, providing for my family. Yes, having food to eat is really important. And if you live in a major city, you're not able to do that. I mean, who the hell is gonna be able to grow all the arugula and microgreens and, you know, Spanish, black-footed, you know, pork that, you know, you eat at a bar in, in Brooklyn, in New York City. It's not gonna happen. It all has to be imported and it's all created by farmers. So farmers are the backbone of all of this. And people forget that, you know, the US used to be majority farmer, you know, you go back a century. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:45:25] The majority in the 19 hundreds, it was 42% of the population and now it's less than two. Yeah,

Spencer Wells [00:45:30] Yeah. And now it, exactly. And so people forget how important farming once was and always will be, because if you don't eat, you won't live.

Vance Crowe [00:45:40] And the complexity of all of this has been when, when we think of a farmer as a part of that 42%, that was a farmer that raised a few hogs and then slaughtered him themself, or they had local butchers, that system is, it's not gone, but it is mostly gone, right? Like for the most part, people take pigs in mass to large factories. And while I am watching a lot of my friends,

Spencer Wells [00:46:05] I used to own a property in the Shenandoah Range in Western Virginia, not in West Virginia, but it was just across the border. And I would drive across into West Virginia, we would go on trips over there and you know, it, it was all Purdue owned, Turkey and chicken farms, you know, massive like greenhouse style, huge chicken raising facilities. It's, it's so difficult to imagine the world that existed before factory farming. And again, most people in the cities don't know anything about this. They've never traveled to these places because

Vance Crowe [00:46:43] Even in good times they were rejecting the idea that you want these factory farms, but if you do not have mass production, you can't have cities where millions of people live on top of one another. Of course. So the people that I see pivoting to be able to sell directly into the city, that's good. But that's for a select few people that will be able to buy directly from farmers because

Spencer Wells [00:47:05] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:47:06] Yeah,

Spencer Wells [00:47:06] Yeah. No, listen, we all complain about factory farming. Like I'm not a fan of feedlots. Like I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, there was a feedlot to the west of town. We would get, you know, when the wind shifted in the right way, the most horrible stench spreading over the entire city. And a lot of people like having allergic outbreaks and everything else from the manure. But, you know, know we also want cheap meat. We want cheap food, and we wanna be able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce for far less than it should really cost to grow. We wanna be able to grow, you know, buy ground beef than far, you know, for far less than it should cost to buy, buy. And the only way to do that is with factory farming. And so you, like, you make choices, you make choices. And I think people are not aware of the choices they have been making

Vance Crowe [00:47:57] A amen to that. And I'll even say I I myself, right? Like I had gotten to the point where I way overvalued efficiency and resiliency seemed to me we all have to be to be almost a silly concept because it's like, well look how, how sophisticated we are. And frankly right now we have weathered, well more than a month of, of slowdown and everybody's able to get meat and everybody's able to get food. So there has proven to be some resiliency. But if it goes on as endemically as you're talking about, we will have real problems.

Spencer Wells [00:48:32] We will. Yeah. And, and you know, again, I I feel like the people who can grow food are gonna be okay in all of this. 'cause that, that is ultimately what it comes down to. If you have shelter, if you have water, the only other thing you need in that equation is food. And if you have those three things, you're gonna be fine. I mean, I, I have a great-grandfather who was a banker in New Jersey in the 1920s. He lost a million dollars in the crash of 1929, and he decamped up to a vacation house he had in Vermont and became a farmer. And they were fine throughout the 1930s. You know, those are the people who are gonna survive.

Vance Crowe [00:49:14] Alright, Spencer, every, every time I talk with somebody, I ask them, what do you think the world will look like in two weeks? What do you think from Indonesia?

Spencer Wells [00:49:27] I think things are gonna be okay here in Indonesia. I'm, I'm concerned about the decision making in the US and the push to get things back on track economically, you know, as we've just been talking about, farmers are more important than stockbrokers in the world, in the grand scheme of things. And, you know, let the farmers make decisions. Don't let the people playing the stock market make the decisions about opening up the economy. So in two weeks, I'm worried that the US is gonna be making decisions based on the wrong inputs and it's not gonna be pretty

Vance Crowe [00:50:07] Well it, I'll tell you, my father is a stockbroker and all my friends are farmers. And I can tell you that the farmers all, all want the, all want them. Well, I can't say all of them. I say a large percentage of them, they don't care right now if the economy is shut down or not because their life goes on because they're hopping in tractors and planting. So

Spencer Wells [00:50:26] Absolutely listen to those people. They're really smart. They understand why it's important.

Vance Crowe [00:50:31] Spencer, this is, this is great. You know, I'm, I'm fond of the phrase, you know, find the person that you respect the most, that you disagree with the most. And I can't say that I disagree with you the most, but I absolutely respect that you are putting your reputation on the line to say things that the rest of the population isn't saying. And right or wrong. I, I deeply respect that you're, you're willing to put it out there and, and I, I appreciate what you're doing for other people.

Spencer Wells [00:50:59] Well, thank you Dan. It's, it's been good talking to you again. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:51:02] Have fun with the rest of your evening and we'll talk later. Thanks man.

Spencer Wells [00:51:05] Stay safe.