#1455 - Lex Fridman

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Hello, Lex.

Lex Fridman (0:03)

You might be wondering why, what I'm wearing on my face.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

I'm not wondering.

Lex Fridman (0:07)

No?

Joe Rogan (0:08)

No, it's coronavirus time. Everybody out there is wearing a mask, so I'm assuming that's what you're wearing on your face.

Lex Fridman (0:13)

Yeah, so this is a homemade mask, takes 30 seconds to make.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

30 seconds? Did you time yourself?

Lex Fridman (0:19)

I don't know.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

If you have a bra, can you cut a cup and strap tie it on? That would work, right?

Lex Fridman (0:25)

But there's no, yes, probably, but as far as I'm aware, there's no scientific study of how effective bras are at filtering.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

How effective is that thing?

Lex Fridman (0:35)

So I'm glad you asked, Joe. So I'm a part of this, and I'll take this off in a few minutes. I just want to, one, I want to talk about some of the science and two, I want to remove some of the stigma that's around masks. So I'm part of this group of scientists that have put together a survey paper showing that masks work. And it started as a movement called masks fall, hashtag, in the Czech Republic, that essentially one of the critical components of stopping the spread of coronavirus is everybody has to wear masks.

And the science is twofold. So, I mean, I need to break this apart, but...

Joe Rogan (1:24)

You're gonna take the mask off eventually, right? Yeah. So let's just take it off now so I can hear you. Because you...

Lex Fridman (1:31)

There's an audio?

Joe Rogan (1:33)

That's so much better.

Lex Fridman (1:33)

Oh, yeah. Nice.

So...

Joe Rogan (1:35)

It's like taking a condom off.

Lex Fridman (1:38)

The before and after. So you probably shouldn't be wearing a mask when you're doing podcasts.

Joe Rogan (1:42)

Definitely not.

Lex Fridman (1:43)

But everywhere else, yes.

Joe Rogan (1:44)

So when you're going out to the grocery store, you should wear a mask everywhere.

Lex Fridman (1:47)

Everywhere. And that's... Okay, so some questions. Do homemade masks work? So there's currently a shortage of N95 respirator masks, which should be exclusively used as PPE, personal protective equipment, by healthcare workers. Okay. There's also a shortage of surgical masks, which are these non-woen fabric masks that work very well for the thing I'm talking about, but because there's a shortage of them, we should not be buying them.

It should be saving them for healthcare workers. And then the open question was whether homemade masks like the one I just described work to stop as a filtration mechanism. This is the confusing thing for the individual-centric society that we live in.

Masks are the most... What are they actually effective for? What they're effective for is to prevent me, if I'm infected, asymptomatic, from spreading the infection to you. So that's where the movement of masks for all started, which is your mask protects me, my mask protects you. And the idea there is I'm not creating a wall from the rest of society. I am contributing to the bigger aggregate picture of it by not allowing the infection to spread. So masks allow you to reduce that transmission rate to one to below one.

So allowing you to decrease the transmission rate while also allowing people to be in public.

Joe Rogan (3:25)

How much have you been studying this disease and the potential remedies and all the different things around it?

A lot. A lot, yeah. What is your thoughts on hydroxychloroquine and zinc and ZPACs? This is something that's been thought of as a potential remedy.

Lex Fridman (3:47)

Yeah, as a potential remedy. So on that side, I haven't studied the actual... So there's nothing clearly published yet. This is the biggest problem. When I say I know a lot, what I and others have been doing is reading a lot of papers that are coming out in the hundreds every single day. So people doing really strong studies across the board.

Joe Rogan (4:09)

This is pretty unprecedented, right? Where something, a new disease comes out, and everyone's scrambling to try to figure out what, if anything, can help it.

Lex Fridman (4:17)

Yeah, there's a lot of aspects here that are unprecedented. The scientific community has stepped up in a way that I've never seen... I couldn't imagine it was possible to do. Like, everybody stop what they're doing, and from whatever walks of life, so artificial intelligence community is really working on a lot of aspects of this, which I can talk about.

Every virologist, bioinformatics folks, so everybody's working on this, looking at different angles, and obviously people who are developing vaccines and antiviral drugs are working on this. The thing is, to your question, we're all waiting for actual studies, so you can't really answer it.