A Population Geneticist on Why COVID-19 Is Like the Black Plague and What Comes Next

Vance Crowe [00:00:01] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast. Spencer Wells, welcome to the podcast.

Spencer Wells [00:00:10] Great to be here. Yeah, happy to be talking to you from Indonesia. Thank God for high-speed internet. This

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] Is amazing. So I am speaking with a person that is a National Geographic explorer in residence, or was at one point in time, is a major figure in population genetics and has figured out how humans have spread across the world and is also a present day. Adventurer. You are right now in Indonesia, and I believe a volcano just exploded not far from where you're at. What's going on? What are you doing in Indonesia during, on April 11th, 2020 during the coronavirus?

Spencer Wells [00:00:51] Well, so my, one of the things that I had the amazing opportunity to do when I was with National Geographic was design and lead private jet tours around the world, which was really awesome. I did nine of them and, you know, figured out what was really good about those and what was not so good. And a couple years ago started talking to a couple of people who had been my mentors in this space and, you know, ended up forming a company to do this ourselves, but with a much smaller groups. So, you know, if you typically go in one of these trips, you're with 80 plus people. It's, it's a very, very nice bus tour experience. It's like a cruise and, you know, no one wants to go on a cruise these days. So we do much smaller trips. We're limited to eight to 10 people. We take smaller jets that allow us to go to much more interesting locations. We can land in smaller airports. And yeah, we were leading a trip through Indonesia, credit to the guests who believed in me. This is part of the reason why I started watching the, the Coronavirus outbreak so carefully back in late January. You know, it, it was very clear that this was gonna be something that would threaten our trip, and we were able to get everybody through safely and they had a wonderful time.

Spencer Wells [00:02:23] We had to evacuate everybody just before the last stop. They flew out from Desar in Bali, which is a major international airport, and, you know, took Emirates home via Dubai. And my wife and I were like, you know, we're looking at what's going on in America and it doesn't look so good. So we decided to stay on in Indonesia, and so that's how we ended up here. We were on a very, very remote island off the coast of Samba, which is an island that nobody ever goes to in Indonesia. If you've been to Indonesia, you've most likely been to Bali and east of Bali is Lombok, which is where we are now. And east of Lombok is Mbwa, and that's mostly known for a copper and gold mine. And we were off the north coast of Mbwa, so it was like planes, trains, and automobiles in order to get there. But it was a wonderful place. And we were there for about two and a half weeks. And, you know, the, the, the corporate people who ran the resort decided, you know, in, in consultation with us. I mean, we had long discussions about this that it didn't make sense just to keep it open. And so they, they shut it down about a week ago and we took a trip. You can read about it on my blog. Hopefully you'll stick a link in there in your show notes. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:03:53] I was reading it last night. It's wild, man. It's, you were talking about spear fishing and getting generators started,

Spencer Wells [00:03:58] Like trains and automobiles getting to Lombok, and now we're in this like, awesome walled compound. So, you know, I went out today for the first time in a week, took out a little motor scooter and road around town, and there's nobody out in the roads. And I carried a mask in my pocket and everybody's wearing masks when they go into enclosed spaces. And it's, you know, it's, it's weird. It's really weird being outside the US while all this is happening. I mean, the, I have been, this is the third crisis that I've been witnessing from outside the us. I was living in England in 2001 when nine 11 happened, and I was, you know, traveling in the former Soviet Union when the financial crisis happened in 2008. And, and so, you know, this is another one and it's just like, it's so weird to be witnessing this right now.

Vance Crowe [00:05:01] What makes it so weird? Why, why, what do you see when you're abroad that you don't see when you're in the United States?

Spencer Wells [00:05:07] The, 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 and, and so on. And then I read the Rais times and I read the Jakarta post, and I read the South China morning post and I read the BBC. And you know, this is a global event. This is unprecedented not only in our lifetimes, but in the last few centuries. This is not only a financial downturn that is going to be as big as the Great Depression in the 1930s. It's not only a pandemic that's going to be as lethal as the 1918 flu pandemic. To me, this the, the only thing that rivals it in history. And I'm a, you know, know I'm a student of history and this is kind of what I do. You know, I use genetics to study history, you know, the, the, the black plague in the, the 17th century. I mean, that's what you have to go back to, to really get a sense of holy

Vance Crowe [00:06:12] Shit, man. Like nobody is saying that this, this, like people are talking about, we're about ready to go back to work and that

Spencer Wells [00:06:20] It's not gonna happen. It's not. And, and if it does, there will be another peak. So I've talked a lot on Twitter and you know, I'm writing a, a article for MIT tech review right now about multiple waves and how we actually go back to work. But as soon as you relax those waves, I mean, look at what's going on in Singapore. That is the best example. I wrote an article for MIT tech review a month ago saying that Singapore had the best response in the world. It was on top of everything. And now Singapore is locking everything down because they relaxed everything and people are becoming infected. There are these community infections that are coming up. This is a really, really wily virus. And you know, we're not gonna get back to normal anytime soon.

Vance Crowe [00:07:13] So the reason that I started this podcast was because I observed, so you and I were speaking just before we started, I spent some time in Africa, and it's there where people are living at the base layer. They have so little margin for error and they don't have police force and they don't have way. So I, on several occasions, saw what happens when a mob gets together and they decide we need justice or we need this problem to, to stop. And so my perception was we now have the possibility for much stronger mobs to grow because you have this very narrow set of views that are being talked about on the news. And when you are doing social media, you think you have a wide swath of opinions, but really you just have the people that are connected one hop or maybe two hops away from your network.

Spencer Wells [00:08:02] Yeah. To

Vance Crowe [00:08:03] Hear you talk about this, I can tell you that there is no one in the United States that I have heard saying that they're gonna compare it to the Black plague. Do you do this because you want people to take it more serious? Like I, it's so stark to me that you would say that. Help me understand why you get to that conclusion.

Spencer Wells [00:08:23] So I'm not doing this for any sort of like social media prominence or a desire to become famous as a prognosticator. I am literally like, if I'm wrong and I honest to God hope I'm wrong, really, if I'm wrong, everybody's gonna be safe. But if I'm right, like a lot of people are gonna die and society is changing. I mean, my god, the, the unemployment rate in the, the US in three weeks has gone to 15%. It's probably gonna go to 30% by June. This is literally unprecedented. And so, you know, we, we look at all these events that are happening around the world and, and you know, as the virus emerges and it, you know, it's clearly mimicking the, the, the seasonal flu, you know, so we'd look at how flu outbreaks happen. They tend to happen in the northern hemisphere, in the northern hemisphere winter, you know, between October and March. They tend to happen in the southern hemisphere on the opposite side of that, you know, this looks very much like that. I think Coronavirus is gonna stick around for a long time. It's about 10 times as lethal as the average, you know, seasonal flu at least. And, and it, you know, depends very much on which demographic group you're in. So, you know, if you have preexisting conditions like pulmonary issues and heart disease, if you're obese, and obesity is a major issue in America, and this is part of the reason why I think, you know, African Americans in the US have been hit so hard is that obesity, and particularly among women in African-American communities have, you know, incredibly high rates of obesity.

Spencer Wells [00:10:14] Like 60%, you know, it, it's gonna kill a lot of people. This is not just the flu. And so, you know, I'm looking at all of this and it's like, eh, it's, it's really scary. It's really scary. And we can get into some of the issues about, I I'm working on a, a piece right now about, you know, genetic predispositions to outcomes. And I think there are, you know, a lot of those because you know, if you look at healthy young people, so people under the age of 50, let's say, there a lot of people who get the disease and they ha have no symptoms, and there are a lot of people who get the disease and they die very quickly. They crash, they go on respirators and you know, the death rate for people who go on respirators is about 50% according to the UK right now. You know, and so there are a lot of genetic components that probably go into that. And, you know, we're just unpacking this virus right now. It's, it's very interesting to me as an evolutionary biologist and somebody who studied virology as an undergrad a long time ago, you know, I was fascinated by virology because of the HIV epidemic that I lived through in the eighties, you know, as a heterosexual straight man. Never caught it, thank God. But, you know, this was very much top of mind in the 1980s for every Gen Xer. It's like, oh my god, you know, we came out of the sexual revolution in the sixties and the seventies and you know, suddenly there's something that can kill you.

Spencer Wells [00:11:53] You know? So this is, this is comparable. This is gonna have a huge impact in my opinion. I have daughters who are millennial age now and, you know, they're, they're really, you know, they're taking this pretty hard.

Vance Crowe [00:12:06] Yeah. Socially, it, it, it strikes me when you watch commercials right now, if you have the regular television on and you see a commercial, anything that is dated pre March 10th, they have people gathering together, shaking hands, talking, being close, and it feels so disjointed. And that only took a few weeks to make that be completely culturally disdain. You, you brought up genetics and there is a lot floating around right now of probably the most simple genetics, which are people saying, Hey, I have a, a positive blood, that means it's, it's gonna be harder on me versus o positive or whatever. What do you give credence to how much we know about really basic stuff like that?

Spencer Wells [00:12:48] We, we know nothing right now. I mean, listen, blood groups, blood groups are the first human genetic polymorphism that we discovered. Carl Steiner in 1901 described the A BO blood groups. And we've known about these for obviously well over a century as a result. And, you know, it's, it's a really simple way of categorizing people into risk pools in the same way that the Greeks could have figured out that old people tend to die from this more than young people, you know. So we've known about the, the, the simple stuff for 4,000 years, 3000 years. You know, to me the, the intelligent approach to this is gonna be figuring out the real genetic components. And so we know that the virus, for instance, has an interaction with the ACE two protein that's expressed on the surface of cells in the lungs and the, the nasopharyngeal complex of the nose and the back of the throat, you know, so ACE two variation is probably gonna play a role. But I think, you know, HLA variation, the human leukocyte antigen, the most polymorphic part of the human genome. I mean, there are protein variants that date back millions of years in the HLA system. And this is a system that, you know, this is what you match when you do a tissue transplant. So if somebody does a liver transplant, for instance, or a kidney transplant, you try to match these because your body doesn't wanna recognize whatever the new organ is is being foreign.

Spencer Wells [00:14:27] But these genes are really developed, they've evolved over billions of years, certainly hundreds of millions need to think about that, possibly billions, but hundreds of millions of years to fight off viruses, essentially. And so HLA is almost certainly gonna be very important in this. I think some of the innate immunity responses, like the toll-like receptors, the TLRs are also gonna be really important. I mean, it, anybody who's studied human population, genetics and immunology, and I've studied both, can tell you like, these are the candidate genes that we need to be looking at right now. And I think there's gonna be a strong correlation, especially with HLA types and responses to this infection, because, you know, the, the data that's coming out is that a lot of people are asymptomatic, you know, they, they, you know, possibly 10 times as many people as are being detected in these random screenings. And so you've got this huge pool of people out there who are infected with the virus and they can spread it, but they never show any symptoms. And they probably have genetic, you know, components or attributes that allow them to, you know, live with this thing in the way that the bats did, the natural hosts of this, as far as we know, I mean, we're, we're assuming right now based on the early research that bats are where this came from.

Spencer Wells [00:15:58] But, you know, probably there are people out there who are able to spread this and show no symptoms, and they're gonna serve as a reservoir moving forward. But some people, and we know that old people, people with pre-existing pulmonary conditions, heart disease, type two diabetes, all the easy stuff to figure out, they're, they're particularly susceptible. But it's also the 27-year-old who runs triathlons, who crashes and burns in New York City. Those are the people who are really interesting to me because they're the ones who give us the genetic insight potentially into why this thing is so deadly in some cases and not others. And moving forward, that's how we choose to categorize risk. It's not just based on age and preexisting conditions. As we start to reengage, you know, and we can't stay locked down forever. I mean, we're already at the point where this is going to be as bad as the Great Depression economically. And so, you know, how do we get past that? People have to start to reengage in the economy. They have to go back to work. You have to do that intelligently though. And what worries me is that, a, as we're seeing, like I'm in East Asia now. Singapore did a fantastic job early on, you know, mapping all the cases and doing contact tracing and everything else that you're supposed to do in this sort of situation. And they had been exposed to SARS in 2002, 2003, and now they have one of the worst outbreaks in Southeast Asia.

Vance Crowe [00:17:36] I had no idea of this. This is, this is, I, if, if I disagreed with you, I would've no way to say it because I have not heard this at all. But,

Spencer Wells [00:17:43] But it's, it's like what's gonna happen is until we figure out a way to intelligently disengage from the lockdown, we're gonna go through waves of this. And so we're gonna see the death rate and the infection rate start to drop, and then we're going to, you know, relax things a little bit. People are gonna go out into society, there's gonna be a reservoir of people who reinfect people who are really susceptible, they're gonna get super sick, go back into the hospital, the government's gonna lock down again. And so there are, there're gonna be these waves. And you know, it's, it's ultimately very predictable if you know anything about viral behavior. But it's, you know, unfortunately, policy makers are not guided by science. They're guided by mostly economics these days.

Vance Crowe [00:18:31] So while you study how genetics moves, I would say that I am a student of culture. That's my, i I really wanna know why people are doing what they're doing in this present moment. And I am observing that people have these conversations with themselves about how the virus is and how serious it is and how other people are reacting. And so the thing that you are describing plays into the narrative of, let's say somebody on the more traditional right, left spectrum, the people on the right say, well, this is the left's dream. They wanna shut everything down, so they wanna make this disease as scary as possible. I don't think that they're doing that on the, on the right because they're foolhardy or, or dangerous. They're just doing it because for them, the economy and getting the traditional, the way things set up back, set up that they want that good thing. How do you bridge that divide? Somebody with your amount of, of information about this? How do you describe, hey, I'm not just telling you that there are waves because you should be scared, but these are waves because this is what the evidence tells us.

Spencer Wells [00:19:34] Well, so, you know, I, I've made this comment several times on Twitter, on social media. You can't spend money when you're dead. We can always crawl our way back out of a financial crisis. We've done it before. We will do it again. This will not be the last time that the world goes into a capitalist financial crisis. But if you die, like there's no way of coming back from that. And so, you know, a a a person that, you know, I follow on social media and who I admire, very good writer, a guy named Jeffrey Miller commented early on in all of this, you know, the people who overreacted to crises like this in the past we call survivors, and the people who didn't overreact died. And so, you know, given the choice, do you wanna live or do you want to die? I'd rather crawl out from a deeper financial crisis than, you know, bury more bodies, honestly.

Vance Crowe [00:20:42] Yeah, there, Eric Weinstein was talking about how this is so deeply enmeshed in the Jewish tradition, right? Where they tell the story of Passover, about the people that didn't wait for their bread to be leavened, and instead they had flatbread, they ate it, and they moved on. And he was like,

Spencer Wells [00:20:58] Matza, we all love matza. Did you do a Seder?

Vance Crowe [00:21:02] I'm not Jewish. This is all, this is, this is not, this is like me trying to dabble in a culture. I don't know.

Spencer Wells [00:21:09] I'm an Episcopalian. I mean, you know, dude, look at my hair. But anyway, no, I mean, absolutely. You know, it's, it's like this is biblical. There's a, there's a massive locust outbreak in East Africa, in the Middle East right now.

Vance Crowe [00:21:24] Horrifying. The

Spencer Wells [00:21:25] Biggest one in generations. There are three volcanoes erupting nearby where I am in Indonesia right now. You know, the world is just like saying no, I mean, what is going on with humanity? And so, you know, I I honestly, I'm not terribly spiritual. I'm certainly not religious, but I do feel like, you know, we have to take some cues from what nature is telling us and nature is telling us right now that whatever we've been doing for the last, you know, few generations ain't working that well.

Vance Crowe [00:22:01] So when you talk about the Black Plague, or I'm certain most of population genetics has huge amounts of disease in it. What do we know about how people would've handled this in the past? I mean, certainly there were other Corona novel coronaviruses or something in this line. What happened in the past?

Spencer Wells [00:22:19] Well, the germ theory for disease was really only discovered by Louis PE in the middle part of the 19th century, you know, and smallpox vaccine dates from the early 19th century, you know, people knew nothing about what was causing these things. And so imagine yourself, and, and this is why it's really interesting for me to be in a place like Indonesia right now, which has this mix of like animist culture and Buddhism and Hinduism, and of course Islam, which is the, you know, largest religion in the country. But it's, it's all mixed together in a really complicated way. You know, what's interesting to me is that, you know, in these traditional societies, they, they really don't understand that there is a, a thing out there that's I relatable, that is identifiable, that can be targeted by potential treatments and vaccines. You know, it's essentially like being back in that pre germ theory era. And so, you know, if you imagine yourself in the Black Plague era, you know, watch The Seventh Seal, which is a wonderful movie by Ingmar Bergman came out in the 1950s, which is about, you know, a soldier in the crusades returning to Sweden, plagued by, you know, black, black death, black plague. You know, imagine yourself being back in one of these pre-scientific eras and it's scary as hell.

Spencer Wells [00:23:54] I mean, you don't know what's causing this. It's like the gods are punishing you for something. And you know, a lot of people around the world have that same worldview these days. And so it must be terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. I mean, you know, I'm a scientist. I kind of understand the proximal causes. I don't understand the distal causes. Nobody does. Why did difference this happen? You, the difference between this two? Well, the proximal cause is, you know, it's a virus. It's a coronavirus with a 30 kb RNA genome, and it's mutating at a certain rate. And we can study the pattern of mutations, we can study the immune response, everything else. But the distal cause is like, why did this thing enter the human population in the first place? What happened? Was it a wet market in Wuhan? Has it been circulating for years as some people, including, you know, very established scientists at the NIH, you know, has it been circulating for years in the human population and suddenly mutated? We don't know. We don't know the distal cause we know the proximal cause. It's, it's, you know, an RNA virus and you know, I'm a scientist and so that gives me some faith in our ability to attack this and to study it. But if you don't have that, oh my God, like this is terrifying. It's, it's like a LOAs. You don't know why it's happening to you, but you know that it's gonna kill you and your family.

Vance Crowe [00:25:23] Well, I, I think I would, it's terrifying the case that, you know, if we think of intelligence as spread out on a, on a standard distribution, you know, a bell curve. I think that we are not that far away from the Middle Ages as far as people's ability to understand the disease on, on any level of sophistication. So for example, for me, I can't go read a paper and say, oh, now I have a deeper understanding of this. At the end of the day, I have to find who I choose to believe. And the faith that I have in either the scientists or the person telling me that we need to get the economy going, it really comes down to which God are you going to make sacrifices in belief of? Is it to go back to work? Is it to listen and, and hold up because we don't know more than I, I mean, we can hear from experts and that message can spread much further, but for the most part, people can't know the virus deeply. They can only know what somebody else can tell them about it.

Spencer Wells [00:26:23] No, I think you're right. And this is something that, you know, I've railed against for years. I mean, I'm 51 years old, you know, as Bill Clinton famously said, I have more yesterday's than tomorrow's. You know, I'm Gen X and I've lived through a lot of things and I've seen a lot of stuff come and go. I grew up in the immediate post Nixon post Vietnam era. I was born in 1961 and, you know, grew up under the threat of communist nuclear annihilation. Saw that disappear in 1990. You know, there's, there's a lot of stuff that has gone on. One of the things that has always bothered me is that, you know, throughout all of this, my lifetime, there are more people who consider it, you know, far more important to learn about Shakespeare sonnets than about how your own body works. You know, so basic biology, you know, I feel like if more people had been taught science in junior high, high school, college, if there had been more required classes in those areas, you know, we would perhaps be in better shape. Right now. I'm, you know, I I I feel like you know, America for some reason, there was a study that was done, I, I wrote about this in a, in a book that I published in 2010 called Pandora Seed America is unique among the O-E-C-E-D countries.

Spencer Wells [00:27:59] So the rich countries in the world in terms of this bizarre anti correlation between religion and acceptance of things like evolution, which is about, you know, being schooled about biology, basically, you know, we're down around where Turkey is and we're a huge anomaly among the OECD countries, you know, and did Toque wrote about this, I mean, America's particularly religious. He said that Americans love to form clubs in part because they've all moved there from somewhere else relatively recently. I mean, there are lots of sociological, you know, a avenues you could investigate on this. But at the end of the day, like, I just feel like more science education would help to prevent things like this from happening. And they would help our leaders, you know, the people in Congress that we rely on, we elect them, we pay their salaries, we pay the president's salary. It would help them, you know, to better make decisions that could protect people. Honestly, you

Vance Crowe [00:29:08] Know,

Spencer Wells [00:29:09] I'm very disappointed in the way that US government has reacted to this.

Vance Crowe [00:29:13] I was talking with Yosha Bach and, well, no, I'm, I'm trying to think where I heard this, but it, it was basically he was making the case, he's an artificial intelligence researcher, used to work at MIT and he was basically saying we had a selection pressure for presidential candidates. That was for, in a postmodernist era where things are much more about theater, of getting things done, because we didn't face an existential threat. And existential threats isolate. What should you be paying attention to, to, if you have very few concerns, very few worries. Now stuttering, Shakespeare's sonnets make total sense. Whereas when you are facing down a war, now all of a sudden parents look at their kids and they say, you're not studying Shakespeare, you're getting your ass in there and you're figuring out how to grow crops, or you're figuring out how to solve diseases.

Spencer Wells [00:30:00] Absolutely. I mean, there's a reason they call it the greatest generation. They lived through the Depression. They went off and they fought off fascism in Europe and in East Asia, and they came back and they built the greatest economy in the history of the world. That is what I love about America. And something has happened to our country in the last, you know, basically the whole time I've been growing up, I mean, I, I've been lucky enough to deal with the large s of that, you know, the eighties and the nineties were an amazing time to be alive, to be a young kid, we didn't have to worry about anything. Everybody like could pursue whatever they wanted to do. We didn't have to worry about being drafted and going up to Vietnam. We didn't have to worry about, you know, threats from the Nazis. We could literally do whatever we wanted. I, in many

Vance Crowe [00:30:51] Cases, feel like, you

Spencer Wells [00:30:52] Know,

Vance Crowe [00:30:53] That created an existential angst about people. I know for me it was like, I can be whatever I wanna be. So now I don't know what I'm gonna do. Like now, oh, there's so many options. And I like that is such a rarity.

Spencer Wells [00:31:09] Pads just like fingers on your hand. And if you take this one, you can't take that one one. So, like, you don't take any of them. And, and it, it, you're right, it becomes an existential arms.

Vance Crowe [00:31:22] One of the things that I've observed, so I've been in the biotech, agricultural crops are very important. You've gotta use this technology because it allows us to do things like use less pesticides. And I got into a class of scientists that understand deeply how the genetics works and how you can test these things. Now, when we flipped from biotech over to, we have this virus in this epidemic, and it's terrible. One of the things that I've observed is that there are many times when they're like, well, the correct answer is lockdown. And if we find a vaccine, it's mandatory. And I've been trying to make the case that you don't just get to decide what the masses do. You have to convince them through some sort of theater, whether it's play acting, whether it's books through its songs, through pop culture, I don't know. But you have to get people to agree that the way that you seek is correct, is the way that you're gonna do it, because you cannot force billions of people to do something they don't understand. I think you are one of the great science communicators of all time. What do you see, who do you see doing a good job of explaining how things should go and, and what lessons should scientists be learning from them?

Spencer Wells [00:32:39] Well, listen, you know, people like Carl Zimmer on the New York Times, you know, follow him on Twitter. He is very good. You know, ed Young is doing a great job of explaining the science. But in terms of that interface between science and culture, there aren't that many people who are making the crossover. I think a lot of people are very afraid right now because there are so many unknowns about the science and, you know, we're in an uncharted territory in terms of the, the social impacts. I agree with you. Like we cannot shut down society forever. We, it just, you know, the world cannot stop working. Like we're already going into something as big as the Great Depression. That is a foregone conclusion. 100% certainty unemployment by July in the United States will be over 30%, I guarantee that. And so we haven't encountered anything like that, you know, in, in our lifetimes. There's no social, you know, memory of this. Like what do you do when that happens? Like the WPA, you know, FDR do we start hiring artists and, you know, builders and you know, engineers to build the, the Golden Gate Bridge, which came out of that whole era. We don't know. I mean, that's, that's something that we've gotta figure out moving forward. You know, I think that scientists who understand the interplay between something like this, an event like this, the scientific and medical aspects and how it has an impact on culture are really important right now.

Spencer Wells [00:34:20] And there aren't that many of them. You know, I want the world to go back to work. Listen, I'm an entrepreneur. I, I've started multiple businesses, you know, tech startups. I own a nightclub in Austin, Texas. I own a travel business. I mean, the latter two are shut down for the foreseeable future. So my income has taken a huge hit. Like I've got skin in the game here. This is not just an academic exercise for me, you know, we need to get the world back to work, but we have to do it intelligently. And so, you know, again, I'm working on a piece that hopefully will help us figure out how to assign risk pools, you know, so there are some people who have very low risk, largely based on age, health and genetics who can go back to work. And, you know, there shouldn't be any issue. I mean, my daughter chose to stay in New York during all of this. She was doing an internship at NBC at the Today Show. You know, she could have gone back to Europe and, you know, sat this out with her sister and my ex-wife in Geneva, Switzerland. But she chose to stay in New York. And I'm very concerned about her. But because she is otherwise healthy and young and female, and you know, as we start to unpack all these risk factors, that's actually a very low risk group. You know, I'm not that worried about her in terms of health, but there are people, you know, if you are over 60, if you are obese, if you're African American, if you have type two diabetes, you know, you have every reason to be very concerned because there's probably like a 30, 40% chance if you catch this thing, you're gonna end up on a respirator.

Spencer Wells [00:36:00] And half the people who who end up on respirators die, they die. And so, you know, this is a very serious disease, but we can start to sort people into risk pools and decide, you know, when we need to reengage with the economy, some risk pools are safe to kind of go out and about and get back to work and keep the economy going, which is so important for everybody. And some, like, you can't do that. Like, we have to figure out, is there a vaccine solution? Is there something else? Do we need to keep you sequestered somewhere safe from this virus? I mean, that's a whole different issue, and that's what the medical community is working on, you know, in addition to treating the, you know, the acute cases. But it's like, okay, so how do we come up with a long term medical solution to this? That the short term is you just don't go out, like you stay locked down at home. But there are other people who can go out and they're not gonna be affected. And if they catch it, they don't have any symptoms. I mean, I've had friends who've caught this and they have, you know, minimal symptoms, you know, so it, there's just this huge heterogeneity and what happens if you catch the virus, and we need to understand that better. And I think genetics, you know, that's the key. Understanding more about the genetics of how otherwise healthy people react to the viral infection.

Vance Crowe [00:37:22] And I mean, that really truly is the value of diversity. We've been talking about the value of diversity for the last five, 10 years in this weird postmodernist way about, you know, who should be hired and who should get a chance on the stage. And now all of a sudden we're seeing you want genetic diversity because that is how you solve one, one key, getting into everybody's locks and killing everybody. You want that diversity because you need as much genetic spread as you, as you can have. I actually, I I remember watching a Nat Geo video that you were doing about the benefit of all this diversity, changing the subject a little bit. One of the big parts of population genetics is migration, right? It's people got up from where they were and they moved for, for whatever reason, maybe it was the, the famine or war or whatever it was. Do you believe that in a modern age, this type of disease will cause mass migrations such that a hundred or a thousand years from now, people will be able to track it back to this?

Spencer Wells [00:38:23] Hmm, that's an interesting question. I, you know, I, I don't know. I haven't thought about it in that way. I mean, in terms of like immediate causes, what I'm most concerned about is the refugees in Syria who are waiting at the border of Turkey to, to get out, get away from isis, and you know, those people are essentially living in abject poverty with very poor health conditions. No access to modern healthcare, no access. I mean, there

Vance Crowe [00:38:57] Describe abject poverty to people that haven't seen it before.

Spencer Wells [00:39:01] Abject poverty is a dollar a day. Imagine living on a dollar a day anywhere in the world. I'm in Indonesia, it's cheap. A dollar a day wouldn't buy you a bowl of rice. Abject poverty is something no one in America has ever experienced. Abject poverty means that your children are starving the whole time they're growing up. You are much more likely as a mother to die in childbirth, and your children are much more likely to die during childbirth. Abject poverty means that you have a life expectancy in the forties to possibly around age 50. Abject poverty is scary as hell. That's what people in Syria are living with right now. And, you know, to the extent that they can get across the border and that they're afraid and aware of the threat that this virus is creating. Yeah, I think that it will cause migrations. You know, it's, it's not as big in instigator of migration as other things. People have always moved for the same basic human reasons. I mean, lack of opportunity at home and the desire to create better opportunities elsewhere. And in the Paleolithic era, which is, you know, 50,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, the great migrations around the world that was food and water. Now it's economic opportunities. You know, you don't wanna live on a dollar a day.

Spencer Wells [00:40:34] You don't, you don't wanna do that anywhere in the world. There is no place where that is a living wage. And so, you know, that's the reason people keep coming to America, why the American dream still holds true. That's the reason why people migrate to cities out of villages because, you know, they're willing to give up comfort in order to make a little bit more money and support their families and hopefully keep them healthy. You know, this, this is gonna be a big hit to the world's big economies, the us, China, Europe, some of the countries in South America and the Middle East. But where it really scares me is the death destruction and absolutely potentially apocalyptic nature of how it's gonna play out in places like India and Africa and in parts of Southeast Asia. I mean, I'm in Indonesia right now. That's the fourth most populous country in the world. It's got 270 million people. It's the the fourth after the us. So China, India, us, Indonesia. Most people don't even realize that, that Indonesia has that many people. It's the most populous Muslim nation in the world. But you know, it's a poor place. And there are a lot of people living in a dollar a day here. And, you know, if this thing takes hold in a place like Indonesia or India or Sub-Saharan Africa, it is going to be depth that we haven't seen on a scale like this since the Black Plague, honestly. And it's, it makes me very sad as somebody who's done so much of his work as a, as a scientist in all of these parts of the world.

Vance Crowe [00:42:10] I saw those videos of Ecuador where people were dying in the barrios, and there's no ambulance coming to pick those people up. So they drag the body away from their house and put it in front of somebody else's house. And you see, these aren't bad people. They just, they don't have options. And they don't, and I, I, I am also concerned about the disease spreading into these highly populated, very poor places, the slums of Kabira, which was where I kind of near where I lived in Kenya. I can't even imagine what they would do if, if a sickness rolled through there. It's, it's, it'll be, and and do you think that is a certainty? Will it absolutely get there? Or is there a way to save

Spencer Wells [00:42:50] It off? We don't know. I mean, the, the, there are two big conundrums, I think, you know, and I, I've gone through this on a podcast that we did recently for, you know, the Inside, which is the podcast I do with Ra Kahn. But you know, the, the two big conundrums so far have been Sweden and India for me, because I feel like I have a pretty clear sense of how this disease takes hold and starts to spread in a society. It comes into a highly cosmopolitan city. And you know, that's mostly through travelers from other countries who are spreading it, and they don't realize they have it, and they're asymptomatic and they spread it in the community, and people start to fan out from there. And that's where, you know, you get these, these outbreaks and the us and the us oh my God, I mean, today the US pest 500,000 cases, we have far more cases than China. I mean, even if you assume that China is lying, you know, through their teeth about the numbers, the US still has far more cases than China has had. China may have a lot of deaths that are unreported, but the US is super scary. And it's partially because Americans travel so much. So these countries, you know, who have lots of travelers coming in cities and, and these places. So anyway, you know, Sweden is starting to tick up. So Sweden, you know, unlike the other Nordic countries and other European countries, has decided that people will not be locked down at home.

Spencer Wells [00:44:22] It's up to individuals to, you know, protect themselves and maintain that six foot distance. Although there was a study that came out earlier today that in fact, you have to maintain at least a 13 foot disc distance. And so six feet isn't enough, you know, again, we're learning so much about this as time goes on, and so don't believe anything definitive that I say or anyone else says about this. We could all be wrong, we could be disproven. That's the way science works. But no, I mean, India has been the other big anomaly. It's like, you know, it's this big country with a lot of slums. You know, if you've seen slum dog millionaire, you know that that's a slum in Mumbai that has 1.5 million people essentially living in rabbit hutches. I mean, we talk about a dollar a day, these people are making less than a dollar a day, and they're living on top of each other with families of 6, 8, 10 people, you know? And the question is, why hasn't it exploded there? And I feel like it's simmering. I feel like it came in relatively late to places like that. I feel like the rich in India have done a pretty good job of isolating themselves, and they're the ones who have traveled the most and have been the most likely to transmit it. But it has taken hold in some of these slum areas, and it's simmering at the moment. It's like a cobra, and it's gonna strike at some point. The question is whether the climate will influence that.

Spencer Wells [00:45:52] And, you know, climate is complicated because there are some issues with temperature and relative humidity that a lot of scientists are talking about. Personally, I feel like the climate issues are more about in the tropics where I am now. You spend most of your day outside and you know, if, if you are in a room with somebody who has this virus, you are 18 times more likely to catch it inside than if you're standing at the same distance outside. That's data that came outta China about a week ago. And so living outside with air circulating is a good thing right now. Like, be as paleo as you can. You

Vance Crowe [00:46:32] Know, that, that example right there is something that was never explained even to me about why do cold spread in the winter? Well, it's because you're spending more time in the same circulated air as other people, or in large part because of that. I, it just never dawned on me before. Think about it. Think

Spencer Wells [00:46:47] About, think about going to, you know, a tightly packed cubicle office space, and you are breathing, if I can be blunt, other people's coughs, sneezes, burps, farts. You are literally breathing everything that comes out of their bodies. And if this virus can transmit over 13 feet, you know, you're breathing everything that the person in the cubicle next to you is spewing out, of course you're gonna get sick. I mean, I've never been sicker than I was, you know, the first year I spent in graduate school up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I took the, the MBTA, the, you know, the, the t every day, the subway and, you know, grabbed onto those, those hand railings and didn't wash my hands as much as I should have. And I caught a cold, literally every single month. And I caught the flu for the last time I ever had it. I've had the flu since I lived in Boston. But, you know, you're packed into those enclosed spaces. You're touching surfaces that other people who are sick are also touching. Of course you're gonna get sick, of course you are. But if you're living outside and, you know, sunlight, UV light almost certainly breaks down the genome of this virus. So spend as much time outside as you can, you know, that's the safest place to be right now.

Vance Crowe [00:48:09] So a person that I keep seeing retweet your things, which I think is fascinating, is Nasim Taleb, who talks all about risk and probabilities and when to panic

Spencer Wells [00:48:21] Wan.

Vance Crowe [00:48:22] Yeah. So was this a, so he declares that this was not a Black Swan event. Do you agree with that? No,

Spencer Wells [00:48:31] It was not a Black swan event. I mean, listen, I, I got interested in this. I have a PhD in human population genetics. I'm an evolutionary biologist, but I took a lot of virology classes. I worked in a virology lapse in undergraduate at MD Anderson. You know, I've been paying attention to this whole field for a long time. I read Lori Garrett's book, the Coming Plague, which is kind of the Bible of emerging Diseases, came out in 1994, read it cover to cover as soon as it was released, New York Times bestseller. Emerging diseases are fascinating to me. And everybody in the emerging disease community has been saying for years something like this is going to happen, which is why we have plans in place, which apparently in the United States we're ignored. And that's the reason why America has been the hardest hit country of all. America has a third of the confirmed infections, but 4.2% of the world's population. I mean, look at the numbers. Why is that? Because literally people chose to ignore what Nasim has called a white swan. You know, we, we knew the black swan was coming and therefore it's a white swan. Some people might call it a gray S one, you know, somewhere in between. Like we knew it was coming, but it was uncertain when, but honestly, anybody in the emerging disease community who studies zoos like this, anybody who looked at what was going on with SARS in 2002, 2003, MERS in 2012 in the Middle East, my wife has had Mers.

Spencer Wells [00:50:11] We were in Abu Dhabi last year. I was teaching a course at NYU Abu Dhabi. We went to a resort down near the Saudi border. She was snuggling up to some camels the night before we left. She had the flu and pneumonia and level. No, no, no. But this is serious. Mers is about 30% fatal. And we went into the emergency room at a very nice, you know, quite frankly, upper middle class, you know, Austin Hospital. We live in Austin, Texas. And I said to them, you know, you should test for Mers. And they said, what's Mers? And I said, you've gotta be freaking kidding. Are you? Like, literally, I will give you the link to the CDC website. You should be taping up this room with plastic right now, because it is a very deadly virus. Anyway, you know? Yes. I, I think, I think Nasem is right. You know, this is something we should have known about, but we chose to ignore, I think. And so that, that's not a black swan, that's an idiotic white swan.

Vance Crowe [00:51:16] Well, NASEM Taleb has this line, and I'll probably get it wrong, where he talks about bureaucracy is a system under which people are conveniently distanced from their own decisions. And I think that we, in, in many ways, we live in a democracy, but really we live in a, in a, in a bureaucracy where we're just filled with bureaucrats over bureaucrats, you know, meetings and groups. And so to me, this, this situation of why weren't we prepared, seemed inevitable. Now people are locked in their houses or, or the people that don't have to be out working are, if you are gonna try and take fate into your own hands, learn as much as you can, be as best prepared as you can to handle what, what Spencer Wells population geneticist is referring to as the potential black plague. What should people be doing with their time right now? So that they can take control of their own response

Spencer Wells [00:52:09] Of their own? You need to, you need to stay inside. I mean, li listen, if, if you are locked inside of a structure and you have no contact with the outside world, or you know, if there is contact, very protected contact where you wear a mask, masks are important. That's part of the reason Asia has done better in this pandemic than any other region. 'cause they wear masks there, wash your hands too often. Like Howard Hughes, no, be worse than Howard Hughes. Like, wash your hands more than he would. You know, just be super paranoid about this. Stay locked inside a structure with, you know, the members of your family or your immediate circle, whatever that is, who you know are not infected, you'll be fine. Literally, like, this is not magic. It's not like, you know, some asteroid's gonna come down and hit you and suddenly infect you. You know, we know how to flatten the curve and it's happening everywhere else in the world except America right now. I mean, I posted something this morning on Twitter, you know, showing that the US is still in exponential growth in literally every other country with reliable data is starting to flatten it. You know, I'm really worried about the states, and this is part of the reason, the reason we we stayed in Indonesia is I made this call about three weeks ago where I was like, I don't really think they're taking this seriously enough. Like 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 before they reached out for it.

Spencer Wells [00:53:46] And then other people who were like wiping their noses while TSA agents who, while they were going through my bags. And I was like, I'm not gonna go back through that. You know, that that is literally a Petri dish. And so many of them will get sick and die. And so many of the people who go through that will get sick and die. So, you know, we made this decision to, to stay in Indonesia, and you know, I I just hope that, you know, the US starts to take this seriously. I mean the, the this weird kind of fight, which shouldn't really be a fight, because again, you can't spend money when you're dead. This fight between like, let's get the economy restarted versus, you know, we have to save lives. You, if you don't save lives, there is no economy.

Vance Crowe [00:54:35] You know, I think Spencer, I think, I think the fear that people that I can, that I can say, so I'm fairly well connected with people in the rural environment, and their fear is that this is, and they're gonna

Spencer Wells [00:54:47] Do fine, by the way, it's that people in the cities who I'm most concerned about, because if you have your own farm, like suddenly it's like being back in the middle ages. It's like the Black plague era. If you have the ability to grow your own food, you're rich. It's like the, the revolution of the peasants in a way, you know? And so city dwellers, places like New York, if there's a problem in the food supply chain, they're screwed. But if you live in a place like Iowa, you know, and you can grow corn and you can grow tomatoes and raise your own pigs and chickens, like, you'll be fine forever. You know, it's a really interesting reset to me.

Vance Crowe [00:55:31] So I think that, so this brings up two things. One, I was talking with a cattle rancher that, that described cities as CAFOs, which I thought was like somewhat a, a jarring, but he was like, really? They are confined animal feeding operations where there are people living vertically. And if anything, the, the benefit of a CAFO is that you can have super high efficiency. The downside is if something gets in there, you have really big problems. But the, the thing that I was gonna bring up with you is I believe that the people that are on the conservative side or on the rural areas, they are viewing this as a communist dream. And I don't mean to make this as a joke, I mean it deadly seriously, they believe that this is a way to force as many people as possible onto the government dole while other people are out working. And I think they can see whether they would name it this way or not, but the, the, the KOL acts being demanded that they work and hand over all their goods to the people that are sitting at home. And so, I I I say this as like, you have to be able to address their fears with more than just, hey, you'll die. It has to be something like,

Spencer Wells [00:56:40] Have same fears.

Vance Crowe [00:56:43] Go ahead.

Spencer Wells [00:56:43] I have those same fears. I mean, listen, I politically I would characterize myself as a, a centrist libertarian. You know, listen, I, I live in Texas. I own guns. You know, I believe in, in, you know, the value of rural America. I have friends who are farmers who do not live in cities, even though most of America does now live in cities. And most of Texas now lives in cities. I choose to live in Austin. But, you know, that's for a lot of other cultural reasons and, and so on business reasons. No, listen, I, I have very big concerns about this as well. And, you know, no one knows how this experiment's gonna play out. I do feel like history is cyclical. I feel like, you know, everybody is a Keynesian when there's a crisis. You know,

Vance Crowe [00:57:36] Speak

Spencer Wells [00:57:37] The economist, you know, Kings who famously said, you know, government needs to step in and provide support for the economy during things like the Great Depression. And, you know, this is what Obama did in, in, you know, 2008 and so on. You know, I have very big concerns about this, honestly. You know, I, I have big concerns about government debt. I, like, I, I'm asking myself, I've literally been, you know, researching for a couple hours a day. Like, what happens when governments run out of money? 'cause we, we came into this with, with a huge amount of debt. And so what happens when we add billions, trillions of dollars to that debt again, and we spend a 30 plus percent unemployment rate? Like, I, I don't know what's gonna happen. It's, it's unprecedented. This is why I'm saying this is so much bigger than anything in, in collective social memory. And so I get those concerns. I totally get them. And, and you know, I agree with them to a certain extent. On the other hand, like, we've gotta do something. We've got to keep people from dying of starvation and, and, you know, keep people from obviously dying of the virus. This is a really scary time and it's so unprecedented that people are throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks.

Vance Crowe [00:58:59] So the answer that I'm, I'm, I always try and get out of people, and it's not that I have a different answer that I wanna argue with people. It's, let's say we flatten the curve, what then indicates to us that we can start opening up I, is it an r not number that's below one, meaning that for every person that gets infected, is it what, what is it?

Spencer Wells [00:59:20] No, no, because listen, if, if everybody stays inside, as I said, we can bring our knot down to zero. If there's no social interaction with people who are uninfected and infected, you will not infect anyone new. It's, you know, this is basic, you know, epidemiology, but the concern is that there are gonna be waves. And so this really becomes a social slash political issue that as or not starts to come down as the curve starts to flatten, there will be tremendous social pressure because of joblessness, because of economic, you know, disenfranchisement. For us to start allowing people back into the community and we'll see another wave and then we'll have to lock down again, and then we'll see another wave. We're seeing it in Singapore. Now. We've seen the hints of it in places like Japan and certainly in Wuhan in China, although nobody really trusts the numbers that are coming out of, of China. But, you know, they're somewhere in this kind of scary area where it's like, okay, there are no new community infections. We release people, they go back to work, people start flying back into the country from elsewhere, and infections go up. And so we have to lock 'em down again. And that is gonna be so much more dangerous for the economy. And what is the solution to that? Well, vaccines potentially, but I have some concerns about vaccines simply because this is a virus that has infected, I think potentially a billion people around the world, most of whom are asymptomatic.

Spencer Wells [01:01:02] And so there's a huge reservoir of this. I don't think this is something that's gonna go away. This is not sars, this is not something that spiked and then, you know, died out. This is something that's gonna become like the seasonal flu. And so we've got a huge number of people who have infections, who can reinfect other people who made themselves become much sicker if their life circumstances change. And, you know, vaccines, if you introduce them into a population where there are, you know, a billion carriers of the virus, each individual probably having multiple strains because of mutations and so on that happen, you know, there's gonna be selective pressure to evolve around that vaccine. I mean, remember that flu vaccines are only 10 to at most about 60% effective every year. So people who get the flu vaccine and still come down with the flu Yeah, happens all the time. 'cause flus change a lot. They mutate a lot. That's gonna happen with this as well. These

Vance Crowe [01:02:03] Conversations you add a aren't happening

Spencer Wells [01:02:05] That mix

Vance Crowe [01:02:05] Spencer, these conversations about this is what a vaccine allows you to do, this is how much this is the thing that I'm, I'm grateful you're talking about it because this is not meles,

Spencer Wells [01:02:17] This is not measles. Measles can be locked down with a vaccine because of a particular set of circumstances and the way it's transmitted and, and so on. It, I am hopeful about a vaccine, but I don't see it as the panacea for this. I I think it's gonna be more complicated digging out of this.

Vance Crowe [01:02:38] So Spencer, one of the questions I find fascinating to hear from everyone is what do you think the world will look like in two weeks?

Spencer Wells [01:02:48] Two weeks? It's gonna be pretty much like it is now. You know, i, I, I think, you know, the difference is gonna be that people are gonna be really tired of being locked up at home. I think there's gonna be a lot more governmental pressure to release people, but you know, you look outside the US and every country is now starting to extend its lockdowns, you know, so, you know, it's happening in Europe, it's happening in Asia, it's gonna happen in the US too. I mean, one of the things that I've been kind of talking about on, on my blog and you know, on, on social media is, you know, what are the companies that are kind of the, the canaries and the, the coal mine for this? And to me, Disney is the ultimate canary in the coal mine for this. Because Disney is effectively a company that is designed for group social entertainment experiences, cruises, first release movies and theaters, theme parks, you know, all these things where lots of people come together and really tight and closed spaces and Disney is being cremated by this, you know? So in two weeks there's gonna be a lot of pushback from, you know, political leaders, from business leaders. Like, we need to get the economy back on track. And what worries is, we're them gonna release things, people are gonna go through this, you know, the series of waves and it's, you know, it's, it's gonna kill more people and it's gonna ultimately make the situation more difficult.

Spencer Wells [01:04:21] And the only solution is one that, you know, I'm trying to outline now, which has to do with, you know, categorizing people into these risk pool based on genetic factors and other factors like age and the other,

Vance Crowe [01:04:34] Oh boy, boy, in a postmodernist world, you are gonna get, you're gonna get hell for this. Get get ready man. If you start posting about, I mean, I, it is true, people should know what their risk is. But in this, you know, so this actually brings up an interesting question. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on this. I believe that there the world is, at least in the US is is splitting into two groups. The traditionalists that think coronavirus is gonna be something we get over and we go back to regular world. And then the post corona list, which is not a good term. What would you term these people over here that have accepted that we have a new reality? And is it more, is there a, is there a way to have a higher fidelity map of who is the post Corona list?

Spencer Wells [01:05:22] Well, you know, the, my my friend Ra Kahn, who I think you might follow on,

Vance Crowe [01:05:28] I love Twitter.

Spencer Wells [01:05:29] Love,

Vance Crowe [01:05:29] Yeah, yeah.

Spencer Wells [01:05:30] Big blog. And he, he actually works for me. He is he a genius? I I love ra. He's, he's,

Vance Crowe [01:05:38] I called Coronas. I've been Spencer because of Ra Kahn. So when he first started that podcast, I was like, anyone that RA is starting a podcast with is worth listening to. So anyway, a big shout out to that guy. And he's definitely worth following on Twitter.

Spencer Wells [01:05:52] No, RA is awesome, but you know, he's, he's called those of us who are, you know, seeing this through a glass darkly, so to speak, you know, Corona, you know, hawks or, you know, corona negatives. I think the world inevitably is gonna change. I think it's changed already. I mean, listen, dude, Tony Fauci, who is, you know, despite whoever Trump has, you know, appointed to head up this or that commission, Tony Fauci is the defacto head of the US response. He said, I don't think we should ever shake hands again. Like, that's not the world I grew up in. And that's happened in three weeks. So I think the world's gonna be a very different place for me. The question is, can we learn from this experience in the same way? You know, I alluded to earlier where the, you know, the black death killed up half of the European population and you know, at a time when they were pre capitas, pre industrialists, you know, land was wealth. Suddenly that meant that, you know, peasants could charge more for their labor and everybody became richer. And that led to, you know, the Renaissance. I don't think we're gonna see nearly the level of death. I think, you know, we're talking about a 1% mortality rate for this, but coming out of this, can we find a way to create a new renaissance and, you know, make society more human?

Spencer Wells [01:07:27] You know, I I feel like we've gone too far down that path that Reagan who, listen, I love Ronald Reagan, I think was, you know, a great president in a lot of ways. But he did set in motion this, you know, capitalist supply side path that, you know, valued corporations over individuals. And I, I think it's time for a reset on that. And I think, you know, workers need to be valued more. I think people would make a dollar a day need to be valued more globally. And, you know, I feel like there's gonna be enough political pressure moving forward that that's gonna change. And I'm hoping that can make the world a better place. I'm not, by no means a communist. I mean, I I did most of my early field work in the post-Soviet era in Uzbekistan and places like that, and saw people being paid in lottery tickets. It, it was a shit hole. And I, I do not want that for America, but I do want America to reevaluate, you know, the role of individuals versus corporations. Mega corporations aren't necessarily good for society. You know, the fact that Apple is considering acquiring Disney because of its downturn right now, and that it has the cash and its back pocket to do that, you know, that you should ask yourself like trillion dollar corporations, Saudi Aramco, okay, yeah, we get that.

Spencer Wells [01:08:59] Like you're sitting in the biggest bubble of easily obtainable petroleum in the world, but you know, a company that makes phones or a company that sells data like Google, like should those be trillion dollar corporations at the expense of, you know, the average worker who, you know, 30% of whom will be out of work by this summer. I think that's a reset that has to happen.

Vance Crowe [01:09:24] Well, I think corporations are gonna lose the sheen of being able to help and being so supportive and being so family oriented. There are a lot of white collar workers sitting at home right now, really grateful that they have a job but not doing much on their stay at home. And they think their company is going to take care of them. And when it comes back that the demand for whatever it was that they were supplying is no longer there, that you're gonna see a shedding. And it's, it's why I, I actually started warning my friends, like the coronavirus grilling photos that you're taking, you know, the, the photos of how you're eating and you're sharing with other people, stop it now because we are going to enter a different world. And one of the biggest differences between the depression in the 1930s and today is that you are going to be able to peek into the haves in a way that the have-nots couldn't do before. The people in Kenya are oftentimes extremely poor. Yeah. And they don't know that other people, or at least when I was living there 15 years ago, they didn't know that other people were poor, but now they can see it. And, and that's going to create a whole different level of stratification in society that becomes unstable in, in a world where the American dream is apparent.

Spencer Wells [01:10:38] Well, and, and this is, you know, one of these unanticipated consequences that worries me if this goes on to the extent that I suspect it will in the us. I hope it won't, but I suspect it will just because of the political pressures with these waves, with, you know, successive shutdowns, you know, in the breakdown in supply chains and people honestly, like who looks being cooped up inside. I mean, the divorce rate in Wuhan shot up by like 50% as soon as people were let out. You know, people are like tired of this. But if it goes on for another few months or a year, I hope it doesn't. But if it goes on for, you know, that length of time, there's gonna be social unrest, especially if you add, you know, some sort of food shortage because, you know, 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, who have food. And so you're

Vance Crowe [01:11:43] Posting, and it can be a triggering event. It, it can even be, that's the, my, that's my greatest fear with mobs is because 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. And that's when you start having people point blame, you have scapegoats. I mean, frankly, it's why I think a lot of the wealthy people, the billionaires right now are gonna donate a quarter of their wealth as soon as possible, because, I mean, I don't mean to be cynical. I think that it's a wonderful thing that they're doing, but you wanna pay in and be as big and philanthropic as you can, as early as you can, because the price is as low as possible right now.

Spencer Wells [01:12:28] Yeah. No, listen, I, I I think that's certainly true, but remember that the truly wealthy have a plan BI mean, Peter Thiel has citizenship in New Zealand and an estate there and a private jet to fly him over. So, you know, if it comes down to it, the truly wealthy are gonna be fine. You know, they'll be on their yachts, they'll be on their private jets, they'll be locked down in safe rooms. You know, it's the average person. That's what worries me. I mean, I just feel like so much of the last 10 years, certainly, and really, you know, since the beginning of the internet era with the creation of this entirely new revolutionary, massively well-funded industry that we've witnessed, that I've been a part of. I mean, I was at Stanford in the nineties and I saw Yahoo go public, and I remember Larry and Sergei as, you know, two grad students in the computer science department developing an algorithm for searching the internet. And I was like, how is that ever gonna make money? Well, yeah, it's a trillion dollar corporation. No, I mean this, this whole era, like, you know, it, it, again, it's, it's been this massive accumulation of wealth by a relatively small number of people that's kind of unprecedented in human history. And, you know, this isn't, we don't have time, you know, to get into universal basic income and job replacement by robots and, you know, AI and all that stuff. But, you know, this is really unprecedented in human history and it's, it's brought a lot of good to the world, but it's also brought a lot of, you know, disruptive change.

Spencer Wells [01:14:07] That's very scary.

Vance Crowe [01:14:09] Well, Spencer, I am so glad that you were here today. If people wanted to follow your wild blog posting and your Twitter, can you let them know where they can find that?

Spencer Wells [01:14:19] Yeah, sure. So just follow me on Twitter at sp wells, S-P-W-E-L-L-S and same handle on Medium. That's where I'm blogging from right now. So, yeah, you know, love to engage with you. I try to get back to people with dms and questions and comments and everything else. So yeah, it was great talking to you, man.

Vance Crowe [01:14:41] Man, this was an honor. I really appreciate it. Stay safe in Indonesia and we'll check back in a couple weeks I think, and find out how, how things fared in your volcano laden area. You too. All right, thanks.