Watching Coronavirus from Indonesia | Spencer Wells Nat Geo explorer

About this episode

One of the most substantive episodes in the corpus: Vance interviews Spencer Wells, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and population geneticist, speaking from a remote resort in Indonesia where he and his wife chose to shelter rather than fly home through what he describes as a "Petri dish" at LAX. Wells argues the pandemic is comparable to the Black Plague in historic scale, criticizes American insularity in media coverage, and lays out a genetics-forward framework for understanding differential COVID outcomes (HLA variation, ACE2 receptor interactions, toll-like receptors) as the path to intelligently reopening society via risk pools rather than blanket lockdowns. He predicts the US will have 30%+ unemployment by summer, criticizes American science education and the anti-correlation between religiosity and scientific acceptance, and frames the "traditionalist vs. post-corona" divide (Vance's recurring framework across episodes) using the term "Corona hawks" borrowed from a colleague. The conversation ranges into mob psychology and social unrest risk driven by hunger and inequality, media/social bubble effects, deficit spending concerns, and a striking closing reflection: unlike the Black Death (which paradoxically enriched surviving peasants via labor scarcity and helped trigger the Renaissance), this pandemic risks entrenching megacorporation power (Apple potentially acquiring Disney) while ordinary workers absorb the shock — a dynamic Wells hopes will trigger political pressure for a "reset" on corporate versus individual value.

“Riots are born on empty bellies. You know, when people get hungry, they get out the guillotines and the guns and the pitchforks and they go after the people who have food.”

“Mobs start to develop an intelligence that is different than rationality. And the intelligence says this is the weak point that we can go push on to make something change. And we don't care how it changes. We just don't want this anymore.”

“The US is very insular. You know, I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal every morning and all the reporting is literally about how is this gonna affect the Americans... This is a global event.”

Key moments

• Wells explains his decision to stay in Indonesia rather than fly home, describing conditions at LAX in late February as a viral "Petri dish."
• Vance's mob framework (informed by time in Africa/Kenya) meets Wells's genetics framing — social media "bubbles" as amplifiers of narrow, homogeneous opinion networks.
• Wells's core ethical argument — "you can't spend money when you're dead" — as the foundation of his pro-lockdown stance.
• Deep dive into HLA, ACE2, and toll-like receptor genetics as the real path to understanding differential COVID severity.
• Discussion of outdoor vs. indoor transmission risk (18x higher indoors per Chinese data) and why respiratory illness clusters seasonally.
• Wells predicts multiple pandemic "waves" as lockdowns relax and reinfect susceptible populations — an early, technically grounded articulation of the wave model.
• Nassim Taleb's "white swan, not black swan" framing — the pandemic was foreseeable and the US ignored known emerging-disease warnings.
• Concerns about unprecedented federal deficit spending and unknown consequences of adding trillions to existing debt.
• Discussion of risk-pool-based reopening as more humane and effective than blanket lockdown, alongside acknowledgment this will provoke backlash in a "postmodernist" political climate.

Notable quotes

“Mobs start to develop an intelligence that is different than rationality... we don't care how it changes. We just don't want this anymore.”

“The Black death killed up half of the European population... that led to the Renaissance. I don't think we're gonna see nearly the level of death... but can we find a way to create a new renaissance and make society more human?”

“You can't spend money when you're dead. We can always crawl our way back out of a financial crisis... But if you die, there's no way of coming back from that.”

“I went through LAX on February 27th flying to Singapore, and there were people trying to grab my passport who were coughing into their hands.”