Thoughts from your favorite podcasts on combatting and embracing the Coronavirus
Thoughts from Podcasts of Tim Ferris, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Bill Simmons, NPR and more
The Coronavirus has touched us all in some capacity or in every capacity possible. Although I do not have it, or am unaware that I do, I work in the NBA. When a player in the NBA tested positive for the Coronavirus, the entire League shut down and the dominoes soon started to fall throughout our nation. Other sports leagues shut down, March Madness was canceled, and then we found out Tom Hanks had the Coronavirus. At that point, it seemed as if the entire nation began to take the virus more seriously.
My day-to-day workflow hasn’t changed greatly. I break down game film and that is something I can do from anywhere. But the changes we each see around us are obvious.
I haven’t seen my co-workers in a couple of weeks. I can’t sit down at my favorite coffee shops. I sanitize and wash my hands 100 times a day more than I used to. I stopped visiting friends. I don’t handshake or hug.
One thing I still do voraciously is listen to podcasts. I had listened to around 15 podcasts on the Coronavirus before I decided, there is some really good information in here and I should start taking notes on these.
It’s not all necessarily health information, you should find that from other relevant sources.
It’s not necessarily governmental information, that also should be found from proper sources.
It’s simply information, thoughts, and things I found quite interesting in the discussion and effects of the Coronavirus.
Medical
Joe Rogan Experience, Episode 1439 with Michael Osterholm (Internationally recognized expert in infectious disease epidemiology), March 10, 2020
MO: “I got a disturbing message from one of the cardiologists at the Milan (Italy) hospital. They are deciding who they have to let die. They aren’t screening the staff anymore because they need all hands-on deck. Even if they are positive (sick), they still have to work (if it’s not severe).”
MO: “38% of nurses in this country have kids in school. If we are closing schools, who is going to take care of those kids? One fourth of the American population has no paid sick leave, if schools are closed, they don’t get paid if they have to stay home. We have to be really thoughtful about these things.”
Making Sense, Sam Harris and Paul Bloom, Episode 192, March 17, 2020
SH: “Comparing Corona to the Flu… people are stuck on that bad analogy. Yes, the flu would be appropriately terrifying if every one of us were going to get it in a single month in the United States and we were going to crash our healthcare system.”
Planet Money, Episode 981, How to Test a Country, March 17, 2020
Host: I’ve spoken to public health leaders, several of them have told me that bringing in the private sector more and faster probably would have really helped.
…The FDA was unable to get on the phone that day. But the FDA did finally give some private businesses their first emergency waiver. …but these first emergency waivers for private companies were issues March 13th, 2 weeks after the public health labs had begun making their own tests, not until 2 and a half months after the virus was first spotted did the capitalism capital of the world let the private sector do what they do best, make stuff for the masses.
…for comparison, the United States and South Korea each detected the virus on the same day in January. But South Korea allowed private health care companies to start making tests by the end of January and at the time of this recording, South Korea has tested 300,000 people compared to 80,000 by the United States.
Fresh Air, Terry Gross and Max Brooks (expert on disaster preparedness), March 24, 2020
TG: We’ve been slow to get started…
MB: We have been disastrously slow and disorganized from Day 1. It’s not true at all that we were caught unprepared, we have been preparing for this since the 1918 influenza pandemic. We saw what was happening in China. The Chinese crime, while they did not tell their own people about what was happening, they did tell the World Health Organization (WHO) what was happening. The knowledge was out. We knew.
MB: The way the government is supposed to work is that the private citizens don’t even know what’s happening. What could have happened, when Wuhan was locked down, we could have put the word out to ramp up emergency supplies, get things ready, have a strategy in place, and then have a press conference, ‘while you were going about your daily life, we in the government were working to stockpile all the material we need to keep this thing at bay. We have done it. We are ready. Here is what you need to do to help us.’ We have a network in place that we as taxpayers have been funding that get us ready for something just like this.
TG: In your book, World War Z (book turned movie), why did you choose China to start the pandemic?
MB: I didn’t so much pick China as China picked itself. In order for my fiction zombie virus to get out of control, I needed 3 critical pieces. 1 — a massive population, recently urbanized. 2 — a first rate transportation network. The virus needs to spread beyond a village to create a pandemic. 3 — you need a government willing to suppress the truth.
TG: China did it again this time, it punished the doctor who was sounding the alarm about the virus and tried to silence other people.
MB: Yes, China did not tell its own people, threatened the bell-ringing doctor, it allowed the virus to rip through the population and allowed infected individuals to spread the virus all around the world. This is why I based World War Z in China.
Life
Tim Ferris, Episode 414 with Jack Kornfield (Buddhist monk, co-founder of Insight Meditation Society), March 12, 2020
JK: “What will it mean to take your circumstance and even though there is anxiety or fear, whatever disruptions… what if you were to turn it around and say, the Universe has provided you with a retreat that you might not have had any opportunity in your life to do this way and to use it somehow, to deepen your compassion, your self-care, and the wisdom you have.”
JK: “BBC did a special on the 60th anniversary of the siege of Leningrad in WWII. Leningrad was besieged for almost 3 years. Hundreds of thousands of people were inside. One older woman who was there as a child was describing the experience, ‘We would go out once a week and in the winter, I went out to pick up bread for my mother and myself. The streets were icy and slippery. I stood in the bread line, went in and got my piece of bread and as I came out, I fell on the ice and my bread fell into a mud puddle. I sat there and I wept. Another woman walked out behind me who had received her bread. She picked me up and she tore her bread in half and put it in a cloth and handed it to me.’ This older woman then showed the camera a ceramic where she pulled out a blue cloth with part of that piece of bread. She said, ‘what that woman did for me, is she gave me the spirit to live through the next year and a half of the siege.’ We have the opportunity, even in difficult times to let our spirit shine.
Bill Simmons Podcast with Malcolm Gladwell, March 12, 2020
MG: I’d been emailing with a friend of mine who knows a lot about this stuff. She lives in London. I told her, I don’t understand Iran, where are the deaths? I was like, ‘Why aren’t we seeing bodies piled up if it’s as bad as it’s portrayed as.’ Now there are satellite photos showing that Iranians are digging up mass graves and lying about how many deaths they’ve had.
MG: To see this problem assesses from various doctors… ‘Don’t close the schools. ‘Why?’ ‘Because so many people working in healthcare, if their kids are home from school, they can’t go to work.’ You could lose your nurse because her 6 year old and 8 year old are home from school.
TED Radio Hour, The Opportunity of Boredom, Manoush Zomorodi (podcast host, tech journalist) and Adam Alter, March 17, 2020
Host: The feeling of being bored isn’t actually something people experience anymore.
MZ: Minds are constantly being stimulated.
Host: It’s a relatively recent phenomenon that we will do anything to keep from being bored.
Host: But by constantly preventing ourselves from becoming bored, we actually might be missing out on something bigger.
AA: How many hours of the day can you reach your phone without moving your feet? About 75–85% say 24 hours a day.
AA: Personal time, exercising, hobbies, conversations with friends and loved ones used to be a couple hours a day and now is slightly less than half an hour a day.
AA: Social, Gaming, dating apps, etc… about half the people, when you interrupt them, they say they don’t feel good about using them. We are spending three times as much time on the apps that don’t make us happy. What they do, they rob us of stopping cues. You get to the end of a newspaper, you get to the end of a magazine, there are no stopping cues anymore. Everything is bottomless, Facebook, Twitter, email, Instagram, text messaging, the news… you just keep going on and on and on.
Making Sense, Sam Harris, 193, March 20, 2020
“Everything we say and do and how we say and do it effects the minds of others. It matters what you communicate and how you communicate it.”
How to not go crazy under quarantine, Charles Duhigg and Celeste Headlee, March 24, 2020
CH: One of the most common things to do when you’re inactive is to pick up your phone and your tablet and start paging through. Research shows, that’s not rest. Your brain doesn’t distinguish between that and work. It’s not restful, it’s not refreshing, it’s not going to make you feel less anxious, it will increase your stress hormones and your heart rate. The default button for society is going to hurt you.
Sports
Sports Media with Richard Deitsch, March 18, 2020
RD: “What is the most important thing people can do right now?” Dr. Celine Gounder: “People need to believe this is real.”
ESPN, Brian Windhorst and the Hoop Collective, March 19, 2020 (excerpts also referenced on podcast from espn.com)
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio tapped into this dissatisfaction upon reacting to the news about the Nets players. “We wish them a speedy recovery,” de Blasio wrote on Twitter. “But, with all due respect, an entire NBA team should NOT get tested for COVID-19 while there are critically ill patients waiting to be tested. Tests should be not for the wealthy, but for the sick.” (According to sources, the Nets paid a private company for the testing).
BW: I think everyone would agree with that. Donald Trump was essentially asked the same thing as in, ‘Do the well connected go to the front of the line?’ He said, ‘No, I wouldn’t say so but perhaps that’s the story of life, that does happen on occasion.
BW: It’s not necessarily what you want to hear someone say but it is accurate.
“I get it,” Michele Roberts said. “People should not be having to wait in line. The at-risk population should be the first to be tested. But god damn it, if the government had done what they were supposed to do, we wouldn’t be competing for an opportunity to be tested.”
“We were doing games where tens of thousands of people were coming into our arenas. We were exposing potentially a lot of people to being infected,” Roberts said. “I get it. If you’re 65 years old — I’m 64 — and you’re symptomatic and want to get tested, it must be difficult to hear about some young’uns getting tested. I get that, and the players get that. But to the extent that there was some effort to find out just how pervasive our infection was so that people would know.
Woj Pod with Andy Slavitt (Obama Healthcare head and founder of US of Care), March 20, 2020
AS: It’s one of the most highly contagious viruses you can imagine. We’re used the something like the flu, this is different. 80% of people who get the Coronavirus get it from someone who didn’t know they had it. We are asymptomatic for awhile, for most of us, it’s mild and for some its lethal.
AS: In Seattle I’ve gotten calls from doctors who are already making decisions to keep people over 80 years old out of the ICU, they just don’t have the ability to save them anymore.
AW: Are we giving people false hope about that somehow, in mid-June, we could possibly be playing professional sports in America, are we doing a disservice to the seriousness of this?
AS: I think so. There will be a lot of pressure and some normalcy will do us good. I would love to see it happen. But, if it happens, it won’t be in our best healthcare interest or our families and countries from a health standpoint. It will happen because we’re going nuts and the economy is struggling. If we do better at social distancing, we’ll have a shot.
AS: If you haven’t panicked yet, you haven’t figured out what’s going on. Don’t live in panic, we can improve this, but you should come to that realization.
AS: They project between 8–15% of people over 70 will die from COVID-19.
AS: The most dangerous time is when we ‘get back to normal.’
Article on ESPN.com from Rachel Nichols interview with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, March 18, 2020
“What are the conditions we need for the league to restart? I would say I’m looking at three different things,” Silver told Nichols. “One is, when can we restart and operate as we’ve known it with 19,000 fans in buildings? … Option two is, should we consider restarting without fans, and what would that mean? Because, presumably, if we had a group of players, and staff around them, and you could test them and follow some sort of protocol, doctors and health officials may say it’s safe to play.
“A third option that we are looking at now … the impact on the national psyche of having no sports programming on television. And one of the things we’ve been talking about are, are there conditions in which a group of players could compete — maybe it’s for a giant fundraiser or just the collective good of the people — where you take a subset of players and, is there a protocol where they can be tested and quarantined and isolated in some way, and they could compete against one another?
“Because people are stuck at home and I think they need a diversion. They need to be entertained.”
Silver went on to say that he estimates the NBA employs as many as 55,000 people — including game-day workers at the 29 NBA arenas across the league — and that part of his thinking is, “How can we restart the economy? What role can the NBA play?”
Spirituality
Grace Chapel with Mike Tatlock, March 15, 2020
There is a lot of pressure on pastors to give an amazing message. …I know people want peace, I know people want hope,. But the tendency right now is to give a false hope and peace. The tendency is to say, ‘when things get back to normal.’ Our peace and our hope can become dependent on things to get back to normal. But the reality is, I can’t promise any peace that’s in the absence of trials. I can’t promise any hope that’s in the absence of struggles. Because what that’s saying is that our peace and hope is contingent on those things being here or not being here. Our peace and hope have to be on something that supersedes that.
We all want to get back to normal. Our world is in chaos. We think if we get back to normal, we can have peace again, we can have hope again. But what if our chaos is actually somebody else’s normal? There are many places in the world that their normal is what we’re experiencing right now. I was in Rwanda and visited this home, no clean water, no electricity, no heat, no food… we are bringing them a meal and our peace and hope and I ask to pray for them. Then the father prays for us and shares a prayer so spirit-filled… I look at his circumstances, all the things they’re lacking, our chaos is their normal and yet they have discovered the power of thriving in those circumstances. There is a gift they can teach us right now.
RobCast with Kristen Bell, Day 5 of What?, March 16, 2020
Kristen Bell: Our friend Jeff was isolated early in life because of illness and he wrote about how that disruption in his life taught him to slow down, taught him to meditate, taught him to eat organic foods, and all these things that healed his body.
Rob Bell: For many people, limits, inhibit imagination but there is a long history in art of limits stimulating imagination in all sorts of ways.
Kristen Bell: You move into giving, kindness, looking out for the most vulnerable and you realize that… that’s what actually saves you.
RobCast with Kristen Bell, Grounding — Part 2, March 23, 2020
Kristen Bell: If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind, there are few.
Kristen Bell: These times we are in are an invitation, an invitation to think differently than we used to think, to operate differently in the world than we used to operate.
