The Big Nap: Why Eric Weinstein Thinks the Pandemic Ends 75 Quiet Years

Asked by Fridman whether he sees a connection between World War II and the current crisis, Weinstein says it is a reminder that individualist abstractions break down in a global emergency. The idea that everyone should do what is best for themselves and leave others alone does not work when the whole world is affected. We did not, he says, somehow leave that behind.

Fridman brings up his grandfather's army experience and the brotherhood that forms in a war. Weinstein is cautious about the comparison and says Stalingrad and Covid cannot be talked about in the same breath. He is struck by the Soviet custom of newlyweds visiting war memorials on their wedding day to thank those who made their happiness possible, and he says the West is not there.

Weinstein explains that he has called the past 75 years the great nap, a period with very little profound disruption by historical standards. This does not mean people felt no fear. The hydrogen bomb was developed during it, but the violent potential of the species stayed in the form of potential energy rather than being realized.

He takes issue with the way Steven Pinker's optimism has been used. Looking only at realized, kinetic measures, he says, things have been getting much better for a long time. But our fragility has grown too, through dependence on electronic systems and vulnerability to disruption, and our destructive potential has skyrocketed.

Asked whether only tragedy wakes us up, Weinstein says positive events can do it too, but it is harder to get people's attention. HIV becoming something people can live with was gradual, so it lacked the "Wednesday effect" of a single moment. The moon landing and the Apollo-Soyuz link-up are examples of positives that happened at a particular time, and he says we should not discount such moments, even a public proposal at a sporting event.

Asked how bad the suffering will get, Weinstein says he cannot figure it out and is perhaps not smart enough to. He sees two storylines. In one, we are not taking things seriously enough: doctors and nurses are using food-packaging lids as masks, and people die needlessly because of triage.

In the other, there are supposedly many ventilators and masks that have not been released, and hospital ships whose beds are unused. These stories feel as though they must both be true yet cannot both be true in any standard way. He concludes that the situation is more serious than we understood and also less serious than some portray it, and that we are not given the tools to interpret the data.

He speculates that the protective equipment problem may be a jurisdictional fight or a question of who pays, rather than a question of whether supplies exist. He admits he does not understand the details, but something, he says, is wildly off in our ability to understand where we are.

Fridman asks about the quiet suffering of people who have lost jobs, including the possibly 50% of small businesses that may go bankrupt. Weinstein agrees it is suffering and warns it might not stay quiet. A recession could become a depression, a depression could lead to armed conflict and war, so the causal chain is not very abstract.

He also frames the lockdown as an incredible experiment, from emissions and traffic patterns to retail vulnerability as Amazon grows stronger. One bright spot, he argues, is that people asked to sacrifice and take risks collectively may lose their appetite for the tough-love attitude toward the unemployed. He thinks countrymen may start to mean more to people outside the military, though he says we are like mice in an experiment without access to the full data.

Fridman worries that people are numb and that fear will turn into panic and anger once the numbness wears off, especially if it lasts for months and is tied to institutional incompetence and a disrupted election. Weinstein answers with the image of Simchat Torah, when a valuable hand-lettered scroll is held up and danced with rather than treated as a relic. Maybe, he says, delayed elections or extraordinary powers will show that people are living through history and that these institutions are not museum pieces.