Balaji_Thanksgiving

Marc Hochstein1h 48min

Speaker 1

00:00

This computer. All right, we're recording Great. Okay, so thanks for your time today, sir. Let's start with COVID, then maybe let's start like like when Where were you? And how did you first hear about this, this virus.

Speaker 2

00:21

So I was just reading my daily content stream in January, and I had heard about the virus in early January, just from some of the biomedical stuff I'd seen, you know, novel, novel virus, but, um, I took it seriously, like many people did, but not enough, um, when China lockdown Wu Han, because that was an unfavorable signal, you know, you look at actions rather than words. And that was not something that the Chinese government, which is very serious about economic development would have done lightly. And then after that, you know, recognizing it's a contagious kind of thing. Um, and that it wasn't going to be a magical containment zones, I would keep it in China, in the age of international travel. And then reading all the early papers, I was like, this looks actually very serious. And it is not being covered enough. And it's being treated as if it's something that's like, you know, something that happens to foreigners, haha. And in fact, there were some remarks like this, you know, in the administration, they were like, Oh, well, this is going to hit the Chinese economy. And it'll show that America is on top. And even, you know, much of the reporting from the NYT and others was basically their, their foreign reporters were covering it. But domestically, they were pooping in the tech reporters thought it was, you know, I mean, they literally tried to cover up the whole thing which we can get to, um, to everybody's major detriment, right. And then, you know, we asked when, and how did you realize was more than just the flu? I mean, like, as soon as I had heard about it, I thought it was serious. The question was, basically, was this going to be like, a bola were so serious that it actually wasn't that contagious. You know, because all the early cases were actually fairly serious, like, you know, the Wu Han pneumonia, on the, you know, Ebola just for your audience to know or what have you. Like, if something is really serious as a pathogen, as many people probably know, by this point, at least, um, then the carrier of it dies before they can pass it on, you know, or they're incapacitated, and they're just lying on a bed. And so it's actually not that contagious. So sort of a sweet spot of being contagious enough, or barely enough rather to generate lots of viral particles to make you go back there, you know, like coughing up mucus, whatever, but not so much that it renders you completely non ambulatory. So you kind of want to turns you into a super spreader before bursting the host alien stuff. Um, so so it was pretty clear that it was serious. The question was, how contagious it was. And that's when like, kind of tracking the Johns Hopkins dashboard which had some of the best stats early on, and really just refreshing that every 12 hours and and triangulating off of noon, Journal of Medicine and whatnot. And, you know, I actually hesitated to tweet about it for a while, simply because it was going to be seen as you know, quote, paranoid or whatever, and then, you know, I put up a marker on January 30. Once I saw these pieces that were like, don't worry about Coronavirus, worry about the flu, infamous BuzzFeed, you know, piece which they just by the way, stealth changed the headline, they never terminate anybody, nobody resigned, nobody even apologized, no retraction. They just stealth edited the headline, like six weeks later to pretend that they had an all pump this article, right? Um, where you know, normally when you when you trust this stuff, you just lose money here, you literally could have lost your life, you know, it actually gets very serious. It's not a joke. And this is something we can come back to. Um, so January 30. I put up this thread, which, you know, I think has gone moderately viral is the one which was, you know, it was called going viral. Do you have you seen that one? Yes, I

Unknown Speaker

04:14

remember it. And I can Yeah.

Speaker 2

04:17

So it's like, you know, what, if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years, you know, and the reason I phrased it that way, is that people were in such a Pooh poohing mode that had to kind of remind them that Wait a second, like, there's a lot of very legitimate, you know, science and academic research and, and frankly, historical records that show that pandemics do exist and things can go viral. And so just being in this Oh, you're so paranoid or whatever mode was just very bizarre to me. Yeah. Um, and so I said it would accelerate many pre existing Trans border closures nationalism, social isolation preppers remote work facemask destruction governments, and I kind of think that unfortunately all happened.

Speaker 1

05:09

Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, and that's, you know, that I think the I mean, that sort of brings me to, I think, what is what is sort of like, the, the important question is like, how did I guess like, how did the I think we, it looks? It looks like he's, he's, I guess what I was gonna get at was, like, how did how did the it we went from? Don't, you know, don't don't wear masks? I remember the Surgeon General had don't wear masks. Right. And like, you know, and, you know, you know, that, you know, the the health care workers needed, which, which? Well, there will, there was there was two things there was the health care workers needed, which, actually, I suppose is like, mix make some sense, because they're the most exposed, but then there was also, you know, but they don't work. You know, are they are they are, they won't, they won't help? Right. And then, very quickly, like, it was like weeks, when like, it became mandatory. And

Speaker 2

06:22

well, so it's funny, I was in the middle of a lot of that, right. And there was there's so much official misinformation flying around, you know, initially, just a few of them, the flu is more serious travel bans are overreacting, only Wu Han visitors are at risk. Avoiding handshakes, is paranoid, the virus is contained. Tests are available masks don't help. Yeah, right. All of those were things that have been promulgated over the critical months of January and February, but had basically been retracted or at least contested by like March 23. And people were fighting masks for actually quite a while. And, um, you know, the, then they just completely flipped as if they had never fought them. And then, you know, oh, my God, why aren't you wearing a mask? Right? And, and, you know, what I realized is that for lots of folks, they just want an authority to tell them what to do. And they get extremely uncomfortable, when they're asked to actually make their own decisions for anything genuinely important. Or to evaluate the evidence, it just made me realize how few people want to or care to evaluate evidence, or some point we can come back to later and how you actually have selves. And in a sense, you know, evaluating evidence in a given area is as much, of course it's much the skill but useful to articulate this, it's as much of a skill as being able to build a chair or engineer a printer, or, you know, like, like fixed eyeglasses or something like that, you know, you need to know carpentry or, you know, like, like, the physics of inkjets or optics, you have to have some domain knowledge. So being able to evaluate information in areas not something you can just say, oh, everyone should do. Um, you know, if this had been some nuclear disaster or something like that, I would have had to learn more nuclear physics. I knew enough biology that I could diligence love this stuff directly. was interesting to me, though, is that folks, folks who were regionalist that need training in the area, we speak about the stuff very authoritatively, right, to people who didn't have training in the area, which included lots of biotech VCs, and it was just bizarre kind of episode.

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