The man that sounded the Coronavirus alarm: Joscha Bach @Plinz | The Vance Crowe Podcast

Joscha Bach [00:00:01] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast,

Vance Crowe [00:00:07] Yoshi B, welcome to the podcast.

Joscha Bach [00:00:11] Nice to meet you. I'm glad to be on.

Vance Crowe [00:00:14] You know, it's funny, you and I have known each other virtually, or at least I've known you for I, I don't know, six or seven years, but this is the first time we've ever been interacting as close to face-to-face as we are right now.

Joscha Bach [00:00:27] Yeah, it's interesting, right? It's

Vance Crowe [00:00:29] The pandemic's caused that sort of thing. So I'm gonna start off by giving my audience a little bit of background about you and fast forwarding kind of why I have you on the podcast. You are a guy that I found through Twitter that was, that talks all about how human beings make decisions and how are human beings different than the way that computers think, and how do you create artificial intelligence is somehow binding those two together. So I've known about you for years and a few months ago I started seeing you post about coronavirus. And for a while there I thought it was kinda cute. And then I started seeing it all the time and I eventually wrote you and told you that I felt like you had a, had the virus in your brain and that I was admonishing you for, for being so loud about it. And I thought you were really harming your reputation. And now fast forward a month and a half, I am nothing short of ashamed of doing that because I was wrong and you were right. And so I wanted to bring you on and find out how did you see this coming and what do you see coming in the future? So thank you so much for coming on today.

Joscha Bach [00:01:38] Thank you very much. So we have known for about risk of pandemics for a long time. That is epidemiologist for many years have said that the question of the next global pandemic is not a question of if, but of when. And I booked this down in the back of my head as something that people that are paid to professionally worry about these things say, which means they do look for a particular type of black swan event and they look for, for the possibilities of this event. And they're relatively smart people and they're well educated on these topics and they probably have a point. But I was not that much concerned. It was not that I was constantly on the lookout for. It was just when I saw what happened in Wuhan and how quickly this got out of control. And when I saw the measures that the Chinese government, after a short period of being undecided what to do about this implemented, and I saw that this was crossing the border, it was relatively clear given the rate at which the infection spread, that it, this would not die out outside of the borders of China. And the similar measures would be used as if they were being used in China. And it was obvious that southeast Asian countries, the, like South Korea and Singapore and Taiwan were using these measures. They were taking this very seriously. Other provinces in China were also acting on the intelligence of Wuhan directly after they had the first few cases.

Joscha Bach [00:03:16] And the western countries were all not doing this. And as a result, it was pretty obvious that all the Western countries would get it. I mean also all the the third world countries are going to get it. Yes. But it, it seemed to be inevitable. I saw basically, for me, the flipping point was somewhere in early mid January that this would pretty inevitably happen and it would be a matter of time until we would react. And what really concerned me was that our institutions maintain the idea that we can get by with out containment and that just, just let's burn, let this burn through the population. And this was extremely concerning to me. I thought that they probably will redecide at some point because when you realize what the mortality is on this and you realize if you don't do anything, then the number of dead people in the US will be something between 1,000,016 million people. It, it's not the end of the world, but it'll be remembered as a holocaust level event. And when the actual diet

Vance Crowe [00:04:21] Starts, holy shit, I've never heard anybody say that even all the way up until this point. Like you're the first person to say this is a Holocaust level event that's pretty stark.

Joscha Bach [00:04:31] It's basically when, when Mark lipid of Harvard explained that he thinks if this goes to the entire population, we are looking at 40 to 80% people that get infected at some point. And then if you look at the Chinese mortality rates and the fact that if a lot of people are infected at the same time something north of a million people within with active symptoms, then this will lead to a complete collapse of our medical system. Which means most people that need intensive care will are not going to get it. And everybody who needs intensive care and doesn't get it dies. Right? This is the definition of intensive care, which means we are looking at the mortality rate at the upper range of what you saw in China. So basically similar things that happened in Wuhan at the top of the epidemic would be things that would be seen in the us And this was basically my upper limit. When you, when you look at what's going to happen, and so if you have 327 million people and 80% of them get infected and but between two and 4% of them die, that's pretty staggering, right? And so I thought, no way, this is something that our governments will let happen, but the difficulty is that they will probably not try to be ahead of the crowds. Our political leaders are not selected for being very far ahead of everybody else. And the public consciousness was much more complacent.

Joscha Bach [00:06:03] And the other thing that irritated me was that the US was implementing norms on not being concerned about the virus. I I thought it was nice of you when you tried to warn me that I was jeopardizing my reputation. I didn't see this as something negative. I I thought that you were generally concerned, right? But I also thought, what is van seeing that I am not seeing? And what he's seeing is probably the public sentiment. He is part of, of a, a hive mind that punishes you if you think the wrong things, right?

Vance Crowe [00:06:41] Yeah. And we've talked about that for, for our entire relationship. It has been, you gave a talk that changed my life. So just so people have a frame set for who you are, you're not an epidemiologist. You talk about artificial intelligence and how to, how to really understand what's going on with things like machine learning. And I came across your work, right as I was trying to figure out why is it that people believe things that are absolutely untrue and yet they're rewarded for believing them. And and so I really developed an entire hypothesis about how people believe what they believe. And I, and I talk about you literally everywhere I've gone, I've spoken to more than a hundred thousand people talking about Yosha Box says that we don't, you know, very little at all. And really what you know is what your tribe believes and what is acceptable among that group of people. And I fucking did it to you at the moment that it was happening because you're exactly right. I was a part of the tribe that was the people that were saying this overreaction to coronavirus is just that and it's, and it's bad. And you are one of those people that I, I don't even know that you really see social norms, do you?

Joscha Bach [00:07:58] Not really? No. It's, it's a very weird concept to me. I mean I can infer the existence, but it's in Agno in a way. What

Vance Crowe [00:08:07] Do you mean? I mean like, 'cause to me I see them all the time, that's who I am is the understanding of social norms, right?

Joscha Bach [00:08:14] You know, there are people which cannot see faces that this, they are able to see that there is geometry on in the front of your head and, but they are unable to tell people apart by their faces. And it was passing to me. I even had a colleague, very, very smart guy who was not able to tell his students apart by their faces. He was doing this by the sound of their voice and by their height and by the color of their hair and so on. But he also never looked into their faces. And when he talked to them, he also could never notice whether they lost interest or what they were at. So he mostly came across as manic and disconnected even though he was a brilliant mathematician and musician and so on. And it struck me that his brain is completely sophisticated. There was nothing wrong with his brain at some level in the sense that there was a general disorder. I think what was missing was a very particular kind of attention. One that very narrowly focuses especially on faces. And this hypertrophic attention for faces is something, once you pay attention to it, you notice it, right? You walk through a crowd and you cannot help but looking at faces all the time. And this, that gives us an extraordinary model of faces that is much better than our model for teacups, right? We don't have a really good model for teacups compared to faces. And it's basically our brain gives you a special reward for being able to recognize a face and figuring out what it's doing right now. And there is an evolutionary reason for having this extraordinary hypertrophied attention, even though it's distracting you from all the other things that made me going on in the crowd.

Joscha Bach [00:09:46] And I suspect for types of mental states, especially in normative states of other people, there is a similar thing going on. It's, it's intrinsically not very interesting to look at what people feel all the time because it's always the same within a certain range, right? It's like the colors of their shirt. Why would you pay attention to everybody's shirt color? There is a certain range of shared colors and in the same way there's a certain range of moral opinions that people have and it's very interesting to know the range, but it's not that interesting where particularly this person comes down in this range, right? It's not interesting what a random person on the street thinks about Trump because they're like only five opinions about Trump. And so the novelty of that is relatively low. It's very difficult to say something completely new about Trump. So in this, in discussions that I have with friends, our opinions about Trump don't play a very big role unless somebody has an extremely big insight that leads us to onto new territory. And I think my particular type of disinterest in these normative opinions that people have is because I'm a nerd. And very simply speaking, a nerd is somebody who thinks that the purpose of communication is to submit their ideas to peer review. And normal people understand that the main purpose of communication is to negotiate our alignment. It's very important whether people think about you because this will determine whether they give you a job. And if you look at the list of requirements for jobs, then the ability to think independently and think deeply is very low on the list, except when you are signing up to be awan or something similar for most jobs that you have, even in public administration and in academia, it's much more important that you are able to sync up with the groups around you.

Joscha Bach [00:11:37] And the ability to think thoughts independently of the group is, has marginal values at best. It is often a hindrance.

Vance Crowe [00:11:46] And so had you ever taken a position that was as heterodox as this one? I mean, you were putting out, you have a relatively large public following and of the people that follow you, they really care what you say. And you are taking a heterodox position that that could have put you in the, in the camp of being the boy who cried wolf, having people never listen to you again on something like this. Yeah,

Joscha Bach [00:12:13] At some level I don't really care about what people think about me. And there are, this is a selection function that basically selects for people that are interact with, which are wired up in a similar way and which respect the autonomy of an intellect. I've, it's not necessarily a strategy that I would recommend because also objectively, there are very few things in the world that do require thinking independently about them. It's mostly when you try to solve problems like when you are a quarter, it doesn't help you to think the same thing as your group. You have to figure out things from first principles and get the complete chain of causality, right? And implement in your computer program. And the computer is not going to budge if you use any social criteria to try to convince it. So if you are say, a physicist or a computer scientist, then this kind of thinking is quite natural. But if you are out in the social domain, especially in a country like ours, which is quite postmodernist, then this has very little utility, right? There are very few situations where it's useful to have an opinion that is different than your opinion of your boss and your peers.

Vance Crowe [00:13:26] Yeah, I mean it definitely, I, I remember that being like a cold smack in the face when you were like, it's very rare that there's a situation where going against what your boss wants is helpful to you and you're like, gosh, you're right. So going with the coronavirus in particular, did you test out your ideas about coronavirus among your circle of friends or with your family before you started putting this out on social media? What, at what point did you decide it's, it's beneficial to my, I don't know. I mean, are are you putting things out in Twitter just to see if people will question you find a better idea?

Joscha Bach [00:14:03] I use Twitter as an interactive notebook for the most part. So I will put out ideas that I think are interesting and that are not too controversial in the sense that they would get anyone in trouble. But I am willing to go out on a limp. I'm willing to take epistological risks because it's interesting to see the feedback. And the nice thing is when you have 10,000 followers on Twitter, it's not that I interact strongly with them or try try to cultivate them or try to maximize my appeal on Twitter than I would have to use a very different strategy. It's mostly that I enjoy the opportunity of saying something that normally in, if you go to a random place in the world and you utter this idea, you will not find anybody who can relate to it. But if you have a rated Twitter following that is very resilient to the things that I'm saying, then the chance that five people have to say something interesting in response to anything I can come up with is pretty high, which means I have somebody to engage with these ideas and help me to develop them further. With respect to the coronavirus, I was very hesitant to say something out loud at first because I am highly aware of the fact that I am not an expert on this topic. And I thought it's dangerous if I mislead people on this. I did read what the experts were saying. It's not that I delude myself into thinking that I know better than people that do this for a living, but I also noticed the division that existed and the reasons why people interacted in in different ways on, on this topic.

Joscha Bach [00:15:40] And I noticed that there was relatively early on something like a consensus between people that were working in epidemiology that basically stopped them from saying things out loud before it was too urgent. And this got me very concerned and I thought it's because they operate in an environment where they feel that there's a risk to their career if they go too far away from the general consensus opinion. And this leads to a publication bias where people basically limit their predictions to, to a benign range where they are much more conservative than they ought to be in their statements. And they are not willing to err on the side of caution, but they are on the side of a conservatism that is between what they actually fear's going to happen and what they think the public will swallow easily. And I mean

Vance Crowe [00:16:31] It seems like the Overton window, right? Like the, that they Yes, exactly. And, and you have cultivated where you're trying to get on the outside to close to radical if not unacceptable ideas and the people that you're talking about publishing in order to stay in academia, they gotta go way closer to the center to if, if not popular ideas at least sensible or, or something in that range.

Joscha Bach [00:16:54] Yeah, I'm not a contrarian. It's, it's not that I think the mainstream is wrong and I am right based on what, no, it's, I felt that at this point for me, when I started tweeting about this, I think it was early February or late January, I, I had my first, first public things about this. It was, I felt, okay, if I'm wrong on this, I will have egg on my face. But if I don't say something out loud and try to shift the needle a little bit and get people an idea that they should be looking at at this topic more, they have a responsibility in some sense to warn people around about this, right? I thought it's very unpopular opinion. The coronavirus might actually be worse than the panic about the coronavirus and right this, this idea, oh, the panic might be worse. This made no sense. There is not a logical, logical argument. It sounds good, but it's probably not true if this is actually a pandemic that will kill many of your grandparents and also many other people and leave many people with lasting disabilities and give you a few, try to have herd immunity. And it turns out that the immunity does last very long, right? Many cold coronaviruses give you immunity only for a few weeks and then you can't get it again. And there are other viruses where the immunity lasts only for a year. So, you know, if you have a situation where you let this go through the population and a million of people die and another 2 million people have a lasting lung disorder and you have this every year, this would be a disaster, right?

Joscha Bach [00:18:33] So I thought,

Vance Crowe [00:18:34] Is that, is that right? I guess of all the people I've heard talking about it, I have assumed an immunity that you get afterwards, like it's like the chicken pox and hey, if you make it through on the other side, you're, you're gonna be okay.

Joscha Bach [00:18:48] No, it's not obvious that you get immunity for coronaviruses.

Vance Crowe [00:18:55] Oh man, you're blowing my mind.

Joscha Bach [00:18:57] So it's, it's possible, but the, it was too early and if you actually read up on this, you could figure out, it's not clear if you actually get herd immunity. So I, I thought, oh my God, this is an extremely risky gamble, even if they're willing to sacrifice a few percent of the population. So we adapt to this, it's not clear that we actually adapt to this. So the basically the risk that they are playing with is probably too high. And that's why I was concerned and I said, okay, you know, my own reputation, what is it worth? I've basically managed to carve out initially in this life for me where I can survive on thinking independently. It's not because I'm better than everybody else, it's often because I am able to look at things from a different perspective and I'm willing to do so. Right? Yeah. Speaking these people are important to have and

Vance Crowe [00:19:53] Let's use, and I mean one of the things that you did, I believe this would've been after I had already come to the realization that wait, Yoshi's, right coronavirus is serious. You wrote an article that took what was becoming mainstream accepted knowledge, which was we've got to flatten the curve and if we do these light measures of social distancing and a few other things, then we can make it instead of that big spike that that vox was showing, we can have this little spike and the area under the graph may all be the same, but we'd rather have it over a over an extended period of time. And that became dogma within a matter of, I don't know, hours from when it came out. And you wrote an article that said at one point I saw it titled The Flattening the curve is a deadly lie. And that was like a, a cold splash of water on me when I read that to realize just how dangerous this thing was if, if we got outta hand. So could you give a summary of of that article for people that didn't read it yet?

Joscha Bach [00:20:55] Yeah. What basically happened, you have all seen this glosson curve, which is a very coarse approximation of how such a disease would play out. And then there was the idea we, if we just stay at home and wash our hands and basically wash our hands very aggressively, we will be able to spread out the disease over a much longer range so our medical system doesn't get overloaded. And you could see this dotted line in, in the curve, which was like at the third of the situation where we don't do anything or maybe at half of it. And so if we would just basically flatten this out a little bit, we would spread out the curve so much that it would fit within the range that our medical system would be able to handle. And I thought this, this is a wrong intuition because the dotted line is actually much, much further down because we are not going to overload if you don't do anything our medical system by a factor of two or three, but by orders of magnitude there, it's probably going to be a factor of more than 10. And this means if we just try not to sneeze at each other, we are not going to get this down sufficiently. The thing was way more infectious than people gave it credit for. I was very concerned when I saw the situation in Japan with the cruise ship. The Japan sent several quarantine officials on the ship and these are people that are probably trained to deal with situations like this. They are concerned about infectious diseases.

Joscha Bach [00:22:26] They probably wore fast masks, face masks and gloves and they washed their hands a lot and a lot of these people got infected after having been on the ship for two hours. There was one guy who was just guiding passengers from a distance of a couple meters for of the ship and he was there for two hours and he got infected. And I thought this thing is really something to be concerned about. This is not just going to go away if you all wash our hands. So the other thing is, if we actually go for the herd immunity thing, how much would you have to flatten the curve to get it down to the level of what our inten intensive care units can handle even if we double the number of intensive care units in this country? And I thought, my god, your intuition are completely wrong. You have to put numbers on the curve. So I put some numbers on the curve and I did a few simulations in more detail at home where I also tried to look at the actual spreading of the disease and so on. But I decided not to go with complicated models because my complicated models were just something that in nerd comes up with this computer and people eventually would've discussed all the decisions that I would've made in the model instead of the faulty intuition. Right? I wanted to make clear your basic intuition of flattening the curve is faulty. If you believe that you can have the same number get infected just over a longer time span and your medical system will be okay and you will still be able to go to a doctor if you need brain surgery or if you need to give birth, get

Vance Crowe [00:23:56] In a car accident, right? Yeah, that's right. Yes.

Joscha Bach [00:23:57] So you, you are wrong. This is not going to happen. You're going to overload your medical system for an extremely long time and even if you try to flatten the curve. So what we have to do is you have to squash the curve.

Vance Crowe [00:24:09] And let me interrupt just, just for a second because I was reading the article and I'm kind of going along as, as I'm reading it, and then I noticed that you pointed something out that I, I mean I took statistics, I took graduate level statistics, I have an understanding of them, but I realized, wait, yosha iss, right? They didn't label their axes. There's no numbers on this graph. They're just saying it's either a big pointy curve or a slow like lower curve. And I realized I am, I am completely beholden to propaganda. I have literally no way of understanding this other than what other people tell me. And so I was reading your article with a sense of awe because it made me realize just how vulnerable I had been to this group think and didn't even know it.

Joscha Bach [00:25:00] So when I wrote this, I, I tried to make it as tight as I could make it within a day in which I wrote it because I thought we need to push the needle on this and the public perception so it's palatable to implement lockdowns as early as possible and to make severe measures as early as possible. 'cause this is actually going to save lives. And I got a lot of criticism for this.

Vance Crowe [00:25:25] Oh you did?

Joscha Bach [00:25:27] Yes, of course I did. So I what turned out that a lot of people that I value very much that I, I know as independent thinkers that are also people that know medical science very well, people like Andrea Watson and Jim O'Neal and that are experts in, in this area that I look up to, told me you did well, it's good that you wrote this thing and this relieved me at the time, even when other people said, how can you put out such a thing without being an expert? And four days later was the study of the Imperial College in London that had much, much more detailed simulations by actual experts and they pretty much came up with the same curves as I did, right? They put on slightly different numbers, but they still had the same order of magnitude effect as me, which was my point. And so I thought it's a good thing that other people are doing the same thing. I think that the people in London were motivated by the same impulse. They wanted to, to flip the needle in the UK policy to say we, we cannot sit this out. We need to implement lockdowns as early as possible. And I think they had a great influence on policymaking in Europe.

Vance Crowe [00:26:47] And so right now in St. Louis, Missouri on, I'm, I'm not even sure what day today is the 24th. Is that right? I don't even know. It's, it's a Wednesday. Any in St. Louis there are a bunch of hospitals that have shut down all elect elective surgeries and they've brought in all of these nurses and set up all these things. And right now, as far as I can tell, they're empty. Right? They're not filled with coronavirus people. Is this because we caught it in time and we squashed the curve? Or is it because we're waiting for hell to be unleashed by this disease and it's just a matter of time?

Joscha Bach [00:27:25] So according to my best models, and I hope that they're not true. It is and it's possible. But I think that we will see the big storm beginning this next week and second half of next week probably. And what

Vance Crowe [00:27:41] Do you mean by that? Why? For the people that aren't as acquainted with numbers, that's the thing.

Joscha Bach [00:27:46] No, the measures that we have implemented will probably do flatten the curve in the sense that we will no longer have the same exponential growth of cases as we had until last week. Right? We now have lockdowns in many areas. They're not stringent in all places. Often people ignore them and so on. So we will have ongoing infection outside of families, but whatever we've done is going to show its effect only in a couple weeks. The incubation of this relatively long, it's typically between four and 14 days. And so people get, will become symptomatic. Many of them may be in a week and the people that need medical care for them, it's hospital care, it's often going to be basically after two weeks. And this means that the majority of the cases will come a little bit later after the infection. You also have to think that p bear mind, this is an exponential phenomenon, which means you have a doubling rate and just if you have a doubling rate of say three to six days, it means that if you have a thousand cases now, then you have next week something like of 4,000 cases and the week after that you have 16,000 cases. Right? And you quickly get to a million cases within a few weeks, but initially you don't see it.

Joscha Bach [00:29:20] So obviously there's this good thought experiment. Imagine you have a lake and you have water, the lease growing on that lake and the water lilies are doubling every day the leaves of the water lilies on the lake. And after 40 days the lake is completely covered with water lilies after how many days is half of the lake covered with water lilies, right? And many people will say maybe 20 days, right? Because that's halfway. But if it's an exponential growth, then it the

Vance Crowe [00:29:51] 39th day

Joscha Bach [00:29:52] Exactly. Which means that after half of the days you will not see that much growth, right? The water lilies will not look that concerning after half of the days. This is the nature of exponential growth. There's also a thing that I realized during the early days, I was following a lot of people that had similar thoughts as me and was discussing things with them. And Tyler Cohen wrote an article about the base raiders and the exponential list. And he said that a lot of messy people, a lot of nerds would be prone to be exponential list. Which basically think that the world is best explained with simple mathematics. 'cause exponential are very simple mathematics, right? It's, it's not that this stuff is complicated at all, it's just not very intuitive. But in, in their experience, the world is best described by mathematics and with a few simple formulas that you can use to predict things that people can intuitively not a predict. And the base raters are people that basically look at what happened in the past and they see that the world has many complex and mitigating factors. So things don't usually turn out that badly as some people would predict this simple mathematics. And I said, yeah, he totally has a point. This is the way we operate. And it's not necessarily that we are wrong. The the math people, the mathy people will be better at predicting black swan events. Things that that didn't happen in the past that we didn't see coming based on previous observations, but that are possible based on the intrinsic logic of how the universe operates.

Joscha Bach [00:31:32] So they will catch certain types of events and in all the other cases, the non-math people will tend to be right, that do probabilities based on past observations, right? So if we do the simple math, we realize, oh my god, 60 million people are going to die. When we look at the past is whenever something like this has happened, people have implemented things that that stopped it. So it's unlikely to happen. And that is, this is true, right? There will be complex things that will happen as soon as the rates of sick people go up. As soon as people get more concerned about this, and not all of these measures will be predicted ahead of time with simple mathematics. And so maybe I shouldn't be that concerned and I thought, but to make this happen, to get the base writers to be right in this situation, we have to warn them, we have to make sure that they implement these measures as soon as possible because every day that we wait is going to kill a few 10,000 more people possibly in the world.

Vance Crowe [00:32:33] And so what do you think prompted the government to start taking things so, so seriously? Do you think the the mathematicians, the exponentials got in there and, and made their case? Or why did it suddenly change?

Joscha Bach [00:32:48] I suspect that there is a certain inertia among the experts that takes a while for them to come to terms with what's going on on the ground. And initially they felt that the economic cost of containment is too high and we will not be able to enforce it. And the social cost is too high because this is a democracy. You cannot just implement authoritarian measures. You have to have to buy in from the population and from lots and lots of stakeholders that you cannot just discipline. And you can also see that this is happening, right? There is a complex negotiation going on where people say maybe it is okay to sacrifice the grandparents, or at least some of them.

Vance Crowe [00:33:28] Yeah. Or, or what is the cost that we're willing to pay in order to sacrifice those parents? But from what I'm hearing you say, it's look, you're not just sacrificing the parents. The economic cost is to keep the numbers from going from a few hundred thousand to a holocaust level of a few million.

Joscha Bach [00:33:44] Yes. And it's also, I think when you make these decisions important to not be guided so much by emotional intuitions, right? You cannot save anyone, you can only postpone the death a little bit. This is the nature of how life works, right? So people cannot be safe. What we have to look at is how many healthy years of life are being lost, for instance, and what trauma is being caused in society and how are we going to hold up with this? And you can also try to come up with the economic impact of these things and the cultural impact of these things that is also real. But to say, okay, if we can save a thousand lives, this has infinite value because they are a life of every human value is infinite. That's a little bit naive to say, right? There's also this fact that if you shut down the economy, people will die as a result of that because there will certain things that are not being produced, like some medication will not be produced or distributed and there will be secondary effects. We ask question, will people actually starve if we manage to organize as well? I don't think that anybody will starve. I mean, if we actually screen and look at the society, 80% of what we are doing is producing landfill or documenting transactions. This is what most people are working in.

Vance Crowe [00:35:09] Yeah.

Joscha Bach [00:35:10] So and our main product are probably casino tokens, right? The big part of our GDP is financial products. And it could actually be that a crisis like this is good for our economy because it lets us reconsider what's valuable to us and how we need to allocate resources. But as long as we can feed everybody and people go unemployed, but we still feed them, we are okay as long as there's no social unrest and the infrastructure doesn't blow up for all these nice restaurants, the casinos and they're on, they all come, come back.

Vance Crowe [00:35:45] Yeah. I, so this is a lot of what I started doing with these interviews started as a result of, I wanted to see what people around the world were doing. So I talked with a lettuce farmer down in Arizona, a grain farmer up in Montana. And I think that our food system, the people growing it is very strong in the sense that it doesn't take that many people to, to be able to produce the amount of food that we need. The holes that I see are much more in the supply chain. So it's, you know, it's not just enough that you grow grain, you've gotta process it and you've gotta move it. And the the processing and moving become very complicated very quickly, right? It, it's not enough to raise a cow. You actually have to have it slaughtered and then moved around to different parts of, of the country. And you have to do it at such an enormous rate. If you've ever seen people harvesting lettuce for us to be able to eat day in and day out, we are no different than locusts. We've just decentralized how, how we're, how we're getting it all. And I, I, yeah, I I I was feeling pretty good about the supply chain and I'm not panicking by any stretch, but of course today Amazon came out and said, we have people in, I think six different facilities that have contracted coronavirus that's gonna be happening in supply chains all over the, the world, not just the US but all over. And that's the thing that makes me say like, hey, things could, the Overton window is kicked wide open and, and crazy things can happen as this system starts having, we start finding out just how resilient everything really is.

Joscha Bach [00:37:21] I think that really irked me was the mask discussion in the US because the surgeon general told the people on Twitter that they should stop buying masks because masks don't help the general public.

Vance Crowe [00:37:32] Yeah, they did. And

Joscha Bach [00:37:33] Also they are necessary for the, the medical system. So at this point, basically every nerd said, you guys just always voice the contradictions, masks help, but they don't help you

Vance Crowe [00:37:48] For no reason. Right? What,

Joscha Bach [00:37:50] Why are you saying this? And some of these nerds get really upset because you need to be a normie to be able to understand that statement as logical.

Vance Crowe [00:37:59] You need to be, it was logical to me. I I, I was flying on planes and I knew about coronavirus and I had masks sitting in my house,

Joscha Bach [00:38:06] Right? So this guy is anointed authority, basically something like a priest, and therefore what he says must be true. And I thought, oh my God, this is so stupid because I understand the motive behind this is, I mean the surgeon general just casually admitted that didn't occur him to him to order masks for the hospitals in January when this was inevitably coming, right? If there is, it's not that the world is generally unable to produce masks, but the supply chain is not arbitrarily elastic. It takes basically a, a couple months to make more of the raw materials and to set up the production chains, but it's possible. So what would've happened, would've needed to happen is to increase demand in January, basically put out all the orders in January, especially for the government suppliers, for the government needs. But this didn't happen for some reason. I thought, this is impossible. Why are they not doing this? They must have paid experts which look at these things and it was not apparently happening. And the surgeon general was not concerned about admitting that he was unaware of the fact that he would need masks for the hospitals and healthcare providers before even the last idiot in the public notice and went to Home Depot and bought everything. Also, this idea that the hospitals would go to Walmart and Amazon to get masks after the public did, strikes me as stupid, this is not how you do your supply. You typically have it separate B2B supply chain with very specific certifications and you don't get a sanding mask N95 from Home Depot.

Joscha Bach [00:39:40] The fact that our healthcare providers are now using these is not a testament to our level of preparation, but it's, when you look at the actual studies, there is not a single study that I am aware of that says masks don't help the general public or they only help you when you're already infected. And there it's relatively easy to find the number of studies that tell you that yes, do masks do help against respiratory diseases even when not used by expert. And so we suddenly had all these stories of medical professionals telling the public how complicated it's to fit a mask. And that a mask doesn't help anything if you don't fit it in extremely complicated day long procedure with lots of asthma time and other people that help you while you hop down and test the fit of your mask. It was completely bullshit. It was a non-sequitur. I I don't doubt that this fitting exists and that it makes a big difference, especially if you are a medical care professional who is working with highly infected people in large numbers at very close distance, right? There's a very different situation than when you are in public transport or when you go to a supermarket and you rub sharp shoulders with some people there, of which some are infected, but still it's a matter of reducing viral load.

Vance Crowe [00:40:57] Yeah, that's what I've heard lately or read something this morning about that the dose is really important. How big of a, of a coronavirus dose do you get may determine how sick you end up getting. So somebody that's exposed to a family member by being in constant contact with them while they're going through their incubation period, way higher dose than if you're passing by somebody and happen to breathe some in, and if you have a mask there that they're saying that might be why South Korea, Japan, Singapore, those places were able to contain it so much faster.

Joscha Bach [00:41:29] Yeah, if you look at a country like Singapore, if you think of Singapore as a patient and you think of every infected patient as a virus in Singapore, right? You have a similar thing going on. If you start with a much smaller number, you can do contact tracing, you can mount a response, you have ICUs, you can deal with this a much easier ways than when you are in a situation as Iran where when you notice the disease, it's already spread very far and very wide. And even some people in government are affected. And now it's very difficult to mount a response. And this is the situation that you're probably in when you are a healthcare professional and somebody is cuffing into your face and you end up with a much, much higher initial load of viruses in your body. So your immune system has no time to prepare, but the invasion of course is relatively small.

Vance Crowe [00:42:22] So with your amount of time to prepare, what did you do to prepare your family? What, what actions did you take that were out of your normal path?

Joscha Bach [00:42:31] I didn't, probably didn't do enough, but it struck me, you know, I have a garage, I can put up a chest freezer, and I've been living in cities since I'm a teenager. I do grew up, did grow up in the countryside. I remembered at home we always had a couple chest freezers and if we got snowed in, we would've been independent for a couple weeks without noticing any difference. I I, I thought chest freezers are super cheap, so why not have a full chest freezer in the garage? And then I thought we need gloves. Gloves are super cheap, but you will want to have a lot of them so you can unpack packages and when you go shopping and so on, it's much more practical to take off your gloves than to try to wash your hands in the supermarket. So small things like this,

Vance Crowe [00:43:21] Are you still going out? Do you go to the grocery store

Joscha Bach [00:43:25] At the moment? We don't go to the grocery store because we did our shopping like couple weeks ago mostly. And it's, at the moment there are delivery services. I think that delivery services are preferable because you can disinfect the boxes before you get them into the house. So it's much easier than going into the grocery stores. And I think I will go back into the grocery stores after they have adapted to suitable measures. So I think it's crucial that everybody in the supply chain is properly protected. And it's clear when you tell everybody that there shouldn't be a mask. And we need masks, first of all, for the medical system, which is of course completely true. It's crucial that our medical providers are protected. It's much more important than our, that our immune system doesn't break down before everything else breaks down. But the supply chain also needs to be protected. And the higher up people are in the chain, the better protected they need to be. Because if somebody high up in the chain is protected, they can infect everybody that comes after them, right? So I'm very concerned about delivery service workers that don't have personal protection because they are going to go to a lot of houses and they're going to potentially interact with a lot of people and touch a lot of things. They're also going to touch a lot of boxes. So it's even more important that the people that pack these boxes are protected. And so the further you go up in this, the, the more important is to harden people. It's a non-obvious thing, but you should be testing everybody who works high up in the supply chain.

Vance Crowe [00:45:02] Man, I, I mean, as, even as I'm hearing you say this, because we've done a good job, I think we unpack things outside or I unpack things outside and I try and disinfect all the boxes, but yeah, it makes you wonder if you should just stop and live off your stores for a while because it's, it's better just to see how this thing's gonna play off. I am, I became probably more sensitized to the danger of coronavirus early because my wife's pregnant and we're having our first child and you know, there's just no data to know how this is, is going to impact things. There's some people saying, Hey, don't worry, it's gonna be fine. But these are the same people that told us we didn't, we didn't need masks.

Joscha Bach [00:45:44] You probably saw this, the data about the Spanish flu, right? In pregnancy?

Vance Crowe [00:45:52] I did not, no,

Joscha Bach [00:45:53] No. There is a whole flu generation from the 1918 Spanish flu where children in the womb were damaged by the flu. So it had grave impacts on iq, earning potential mortality and so on, and life expectancy for this generation that was in the womb while this epidemic happened.

Vance Crowe [00:46:15] Wow.

Joscha Bach [00:46:16] And so this is thing that you want to be concerned about because it, it's an obvious thing when your wife gets sick that your, the organism will use as many resources as it needs to fight the disease. And these are all resources that are not available for the fetus. And it's potentially a very serious disease that can lead to lasting disabilities. It's especially concerning if you have pneumonia and part of your lung tissue turns necrotic, and this means you have a permanently diminished lung capacity, even if you recover. And of course this has an impact on the ability to deal with, to, to nurture your fetus very well in your body. So pregnancy is certainly something where I would raise the alarm and say, make sure that you don't get infected if you can help it.

Vance Crowe [00:47:10] Yeah, I, I mean I'm, that, that's a hundred percent what we're trying to do. And I think that they, I know that they've suspended all IVF treatments in the St. Louis area because they're saying, we don't know. And you've got these people that are going to extraordinary measures to get pregnant. And man, it is no small thing I'm sure to suspend all IVF treatments in a region because the time is not on those people's sides that are doing that.

Joscha Bach [00:47:36] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:47:38] So what do you think people should be thinking about now? You know, we're in the middle of chaos and people are saying, I don't have a job. I'm stuck at my house. I don't know where the economy is going. But if you're saying you have a limited bandwidth, limited things, you should pay attention to what, you know, what should they be if they're a normie? How do you weather this storm when, when you're completely subjected to the whims of the propaganda of the people that, that want calm over necessarily the right answers?

Joscha Bach [00:48:10] I don't think that there is this either or it's not that there is a part of the population that is super smart and sees everything objectively and the other one is completely diluted. Everybody can get enlightened. It's just the passes is very different. And so it, it's not that nobody can see what's going on, it's just something that you have to question yourself and catch yourself and deal with your cognitive biases. The crucial thing in this situation is that we have to basically try to put common sense over normative opinions. And the common sense is, is not the, what the majority of people thinks, but the things that we, if we ask ourselves what's most likely to be true and the things that are most likely to be true are independent of what somebody with a strong opinion is wanting you to believe. It's just the thing based on the facts that we have that's most likely corresponds to the universe that we are actually living in. And the situation right now is from the standpoint of the economy is very dire, right? We, if we put a couple trillion dollars on, on this, that's an enormous amount of death. It's going to be doing very serious things to the dollar and to the stock market. And most of these things are not good. But if you look on the ground, it's not going to diminish our food supply. Also, I'm not concerned about the supply chains in the sense that, I mean, we will have 30% unemployment. There will be a lot of very capable people that we can use to, to help with the situation and put to work.

Joscha Bach [00:49:42] And I also want to be put to work. I found that a lot of people actually find this crisis, not anxiety inducing if they can do something. So as soon as you feel that you can organize a response in your neighborhood or wherever you are working, you feel better about this and you can do something about this. So I, I think it's very crucial to exchange phone numbers with neighbors and make sure that if there are singles or elderly people that you can look after them. It's also a main thing with the mask discussion that was very concerning to me. You, you need to have mass in your home. I think at least a few of them, not just because to protect yourself and you are in the supermarket and there could be some germs in the air, but there is a high probability that at some point you will be called upon looking after a person who you know to be sick, but you need to put, give somebody something to eat because they cannot go to the hospital and they are so ill that they cannot make food for themselves for a while. Like if you have the flu and so on, you and you, you are down visit, you probably need a spouse or somebody else to help you, right? And, and there will be many people in this situation who don't have anybody to look after them. So this is a crucial thing where everybody can help mounting a neighborhood response, make sure that you build a network and support the existing networks, especially with elderly people and those that are dependent on the behalf of others.

Vance Crowe [00:51:07] I think that's the best, the best advice I've heard of anybody anywhere. I, I know we've called our neighbors, people that we've lived by for a couple of years now and barely have spoken with and it's been one of the, the best things to happen. I mean, people are truly grateful when you call them up and say, Hey, I just wanted to check and see how are you and let you know that you can call us. So there's a, a way to spread goodness in this time of chaos, I think. So Yosha, I'm gonna end with the, with the question I've asked every person I've interviewed, what do you think the world will look like in two weeks?

Joscha Bach [00:51:45] I think at, at two weeks we will be in a situation where there's panic. It's basically, I suspect in two weeks from now there will be a storm pounding us, and this will last for something like one more month until the current lockdown measures start to show a visible effect. The good thing is if we implement lockdowns, and as soon as the situation becomes more dire, the measures are likely to going to be much more stringent, we will get a better situation. Because if people are no longer moving outside of the house, no longer meeting anybody who's not a, a family member of his protective equipment, there will be no more new infections. And as soon as an area has no new infections for a couple weeks, we can lift the blockages again, right? We can move again. And this, so this can be over much sooner than some people are aware of right now, a lot of people in government seem to think it's going to take 18 months, but if we do this right, we will stomp out this virus. There's a situation that concerns me is that we will basically have red and green zones in the world in a few months from now. There will be countries that will not be able to afford the measures that are necessary because they don't have the necessary level of organization. And I think the US will find it within themselves to reactivate these levels of organization. The reason why the US is so incompetent and is unable to build a subway or high speed train anymore, it's not because everybody in the US is suddenly stupid.

Joscha Bach [00:53:22] It's because our government is, is no longer confronted with existential crisis for a long time, right in the fifties, the US was still facing existential risks. There was an active war going on later on, we had a cold war. And the more things became safe, the more the country turned from the modernist country into a postmodernist country. God, you're

Vance Crowe [00:53:44] Right. Government, you're totally right.

Joscha Bach [00:53:47] Yeah. So government in in peace times, if you wait for a couple generations turns into a theater, it's a theatrical performance. And when people evaluate the performance of politicians, especially the media, they basically evaluate the quality of the acting. And the media is very concerned about Trump because he's such a lowbrow actor. He's basically not playing to the audience of the educated critics. He's playing to an audience of largely uneducated critics. And they don't like that, right? And they don't have enough self-awareness largely to understand what's going on and that them denouncing Trump increases his popularity with the uneducated critics, right? So when Trump says Chinese virus, then Vox will reflexively condemn his racism for 60% of the nation roll their eyes. And, and Vox is helping to get Trump reelected. This is a, a thing that is concerning to me because it doesn't seem that our current administration is perfectly well equipped to deal with this crisis, right? It would be very nice to have very competent people in power. But you know, the, the larger the pressure becomes, the more the people in charge will be inclined to let actually competent people to take over and implement the measures that need to be done. Because these people do exist, right? There are systemic thinkers, it's just that they're no longer in demand and see in times, like the ones that we had in the last few decades. So we will probably end after this crisis with a slightly more competent administration, with a slightly more productive economy, with slightly better awareness of what this is all about when we build a society and the civilization and it's also going to bring people more together.

Joscha Bach [00:55:33] So I am pretty optimistic for the future. There's going to be a time after the crisis where people feel, oh my God, we got through this and now there's so much opportunity and we are rebuilding things. And so even though the next couple weeks things are going to look bleak, I think in six months from now, the situation might be looking much, much better. And then we get the media work. I mean, this is 2020.

Vance Crowe [00:55:59] This is amazing. I mean, I, and, and everything you're saying to me intuitively makes sense as I hear you say it. So yosha, I I would probably really like to come back in a couple of weeks and, and check in with you and see how things are going. I know that I, for one, am deeply grateful that, that you're not a normie and, and that somehow we made this connection a long time ago. If people wanna follow you, you are at Plin, P-L-I-N-Z, and you're fun, fun guy on Twitter. But right now, kind of scary, but I think probably in a good way.

Joscha Bach [00:56:35] Thank you, Vance.

Vance Crowe [00:56:36] So thank you and I hope you have a, a, a good time with your family while you're in quarantine or while you're in lockdown. And be safe out there, Yosha.

Joscha Bach [00:56:45] Thank you. You too. Thank you. Bye-Bye.