Sam Parr and a guest compare COVID-19 to 9/11, but note the virus is invisible, making inaction the recommended response. They discuss Pascal's idea that humans can't sit alone, and Sam shares his dislike of remote work despite its temporary appeal.
This is like nothing I've ever experienced. I know there are some analogies, like you said, 9/11. I saw this great tweet from this guy, his name is Yishan Wong. I don't know if you know who he is. He's, uh, he was the former CEO of Reddit. He was like an ex-Facebook guy, CEO of Reddit for a while. Really smart guy. I love following him on Twitter. He doesn't have that many followers, but he says a lot of smart shit. That I just basically steal and then say myself later. And he was saying, he was like, you know, this coronavirus thing is so different from like the last thing that felt like this was 9/11. And he goes, this is so much harder for Americans. He's like, because when it was 9/11, the response was all bravery, patriotism, action, revenge. It was, it was all action things. And there was a clear visible enemy. It was like, okay, you know, sort of the terrorists, bin Laden, you got this picture in your brain that you could sort of point it to. He's like, with this, we have an invisible enemy. You can't see the virus, you don't know who has it, you don't know who doesn't, so we all just have to hide. And the best course of action is inaction. And that's very strange for people. And it reminds me of this quote by Pascal, which is like, all of man's problems come down to— I'm butchering the quote, but it's like, all of man's problems come down to the fact that He cannot sit alone in a room for 30 minutes. It's basically like being able to just sit in your house and chill, and it's so difficult for people.
You know, it's funny, there's— I was talking to a coworker. I'm like, there's two things that a lot of people want and then they get it and it freaks them out. And this is a little taste of that, which is people talk about retiring. They want enough money that they could retire. And a lot of people want to work from home. And I've gotten a lot of shit from the work from home. Home crowd because I'm, cuz I keep saying, I hate this. I hate it. I love coming into the office and feeling energy. And, uh, I retired one, not retired. I took, I've taken 8 months off at a time and it gets boring fast. And what we're seeing now is that some people are, you can kind of taste it, uh, a little bit. And I personally hate it. And so, um, okay.
I got, I got the quote cuz I butchered it. Uh, All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Okay, that's the quote. I had to correct it because it's such a good quote.
