Seven Levels of a Pandemic: Pain, Challenge and Hope From Biology to Philosophy

Fridman opens by calling the coronavirus a global crisis that is also a moment that unites people and shows the strength of community and compassion. He lays out seven levels at which he sees the virus attacking the fundamental nature of society, from the individual body up to the meaning of life.

The first four are biological and medical, psychological, social (the collective cognition of the species) and economic. The last three are political, existential, looking at civilization-level threats such as AI, nanotechnology and engineered pandemics, and finally philosophical: what are we supposed to be together, and what is the meaning of it all?

He says this video is higher level than the data aggregation and simulation work he has been doing on the spread of pandemics. For each level he will describe the pain we are likely to feel, the challenge to overcome and the hope on the other side. He also asks viewers to report errors, because mistakes in a video like this could cost lives.

Fridman says it is still too early to make good projections of cases or deaths. In the best case, with swift government action, individuals doing their part and hospitals not overwhelmed, deaths could be at or below annual influenza levels, which is still tragic. If the response is slow, the worst case could run into the millions, and the virus looks far more dangerous than the flu.

For individuals the message is clear: stay home, practise distancing, wash hands, and avoid infecting others. Healthcare and service workers are the heroes on the front line, and what seems to work best is testing early and quickly, treating when needed and tracing contacts so they can be isolated. Scientists, engineers and manufacturers are racing on antivirals, vaccines, ventilators, test kits and masks.

He recommends Tracy Kidder's *Mountains Beyond Mountains*, about Paul Farmer, which made him realize that doctors face ethical decisions beyond reason and must listen to their hearts. His hope is that a swift response turns this into a dress rehearsal for a much worse pandemic, so that we invest in science and healthcare infrastructure. He also expects a discussion about technology and the balance between privacy and health, including who controls and regulates the data.

The second attack is on individual emotion: fear of losing a job, health, a loved one or basic resources like water, food and power, as well as fear of uncertainty itself, which can strain families. Fridman's advice is to stay calm and informed and to let reason override emotion in decision-making.

He also suggests this is as good a time as any to ask whether you are living your dream and passion. He encourages people to start writing, reading or an online class, and business owners to rethink what their business does and at what scale. He admits this can be painful, especially for people living paycheck to paycheck with families to support.

His hope at this level is that people use the moment to reevaluate their lives and take a leap at something they have always wanted to do. More broadly, he hopes we overcome the natural fear of uncertainty and lean into love and compassion for others instead of giving in to fear.

Fridman notes that "social distancing" is really physical distancing, and it has pushed people toward social media for connection and information. That gradually replaces our own thinking with the collective cognition of the hive mind, which magnifies the psychological attack. Fear, misinformation, anti-scientific claims and conspiracy theories all spread efficiently there, which he calls one of the most novel aspects of this pandemic.

The individual challenge is self-reflection and detachment. He points to Yuval Harari's last chapter in *21 Lessons for the 21st Century* on meditation, as a way to hear your own inner voice and observe waves of panic rather than internalize them. He also urges people to look for source scientific information rather than opinion pieces about it, and not to think a certain way just because their political or social group does.

His hope is that this becomes a wake-up call about how society uses social media, both in controlling misinformation and in resisting the dopamine-driven drama of likes and outrage. He sees it as a medium that could encourage deep connection and friendship, which he calls both a technology problem and a societal one. Since people come together in a time of panic, he sees no reason they cannot stay together online.

Fridman calls the economic level potentially the most painful. Economists were predicting double-digit GDP drops in the second quarter and millions of US job losses, three to seven million by his account, mostly in service industries like hotels, travel and restaurants. He cites surveys in which half of small business owners say they cannot avoid bankruptcy within three months.

The challenge for citizens is to hold politicians accountable on the fiscal stimulus, learning from the 2008 crisis so that help reaches workers and small businesses on the verge of bankruptcy. Consumers who can afford it should keep spending on what they need, especially at local and small businesses, since consumer spending is about 70 percent of the US economy. Small businesses should see this as a chance to reinvent, add an online presence and pivot.

Fridman draws on his own experience of recently leaving his job and building a startup that brings in no money. He says he had to reinvent and pivot, which was painful but could be liberating. He hopes for a quick V-shaped recovery rather than a U, and finds a darker silver lining in the fact that people feel this pain together: the pain you feel is also felt by your neighbours.

Fridman says the US is living through one of its most politically divided periods, with an impeachment just behind it and an election ahead, and the politicization of everything including the virus is a damaging attack vector. He adds that crises like wars and pandemics have historically led to a diminishment of rights and freedoms.

The challenge for citizens is not to let charlatans of any party exploit fear to overreach, whether through mass surveillance, martial law, detention without trial or, in the worst case, cancelled elections. He argues the virus should not be a red or blue issue, and that the trillion-dollar-plus stimulus can make the difference between a fast recovery and a delayed one, so politics should play no part in those decisions.

His hope is that after beating the virus we reinvest in the federal infrastructure that responds to global threats, and that it reminds us what working together can achieve, as going to the moon did. He is surprised that politicians play games with scientific facts, and says that on the most important questions thousands of scientists try to disprove each other, which cuts out the nonsense. Science cannot answer ethical questions, but it is well equipped for threats to our wellbeing, and we should not politicize it.

Fridman points out that humanity has not always existed and has no guarantee of surviving, and recommends work on existential risk by Nick Bostrom and the Future of Humanity Institute. The threats he lists include global warming, nuclear war, nanotechnology accidents and weapons, superintelligent AI, and both natural and engineered pandemics.

The current pandemic is unlikely to be extinction-level, but he calls it a dress rehearsal that reveals our fragility. Something that feels totally unexpected is completely expected to those who listen to experts, and pandemic experts predict a much worse one is coming. As someone who builds narrow AI systems, he sees how far we are from superintelligence, but says the pandemic has changed his mind and made him think more clearly about threats arriving in unexpected ways.

He says it is his responsibility, as someone knowledgeable in AI, to think bigger about unexpected threats to the most vulnerable and to everyone. The challenge for society is to invest in research across all these avenues. Research not only reveals protective mechanisms but also the likely vectors of attack, and it prepares the tooling and infrastructure needed before a problem could kill a billion or more people.

For the philosophical level, Fridman turns to Albert Camus's *The Plague*, in which suffering is simply part of life and the question is how we respond to it. The lesson he draws is that love and compassion for others is how we conquer suffering.

The natural instinct is to turn inward and isolate yourself from a source of pain and loss, but he argues that hiding from life and from others does not remove suffering and instead stokes the fire of dread. For Camus, he says, the way to overcome it, and the meaning of life, is to love others.

He notes that the book is an allegory for World War II, which is deeply embedded in the story of the Soviet Union where he was born and raised. After all that suffering and death, what emerges is that love for each other conquers all. His hope is that we emerge with a greater sense of community, and that the virus is a reminder that love is the meaning of life.