#1566 - Nicholas Christakis

Joe Rogan (0:15)

I did Sober October, and during the month of October, no drinking at all, and I started smoking cigars.

Nicholas Christakis (0:22)

How did the Sober October work for you?

Joe Rogan (0:24)

It's great, I do it every year. It's nice, a little reset.

Nicholas Christakis (0:28)

It's interesting, I have another friend of mine who stopped drinking all together, and he said that it was making him cranky when he was drinking, and of course there were extra calories, and I listened patiently to him and thought I would love to do that, but at the same time, it's hard to give up completely.

Joe Rogan (0:47)

I enjoy a glass of wine with a meal, that I miss the most.

That was the worst when I was having a steak, and I'm just like, God, a nice glass of red wine right now. But other than that, I don't drink much. I'm not much of a boozer. Although when November kicks in and I know I can drink again, there's usually a few days of excess.

Which is, speaking of the subject of COVID-19 and the current pandemic we're into, that's not a good thing. There's a lot of people out there destroying their immune systems drinking. There's a very funny video that I found online of this gentleman who runs around his neighborhood. And he noticed that during the lockdown, he would run around his neighborhood and he would see the recyclable bins. And they were just filled with empty alcohol containers. He's like, this is crazy. This is for the week. Like, how much of these people drinking just vodka and wine? And there's a lot of that going on.

Nicholas Christakis (1:43)

Yeah, people have actually looked a little bit at that, at alcohol consumption.

And it's a little bit like the toilet paper shortage. I don't know if you followed the whole toilet paper shortage thing. Well, what's happening is there's a shift in consumption. You know, a lot of the drinking that was taking place in restaurants and at bars is now taking place at home.

So I think it's like half and half, like half the consumption in the past was at home and half was out of the home. And now it's almost all at home, which is part of it. But I also think, as you're suggesting, the actual amount is going up, too. So, so yes, it's, you know, and it's contributing to weight gain and other problems in our society.

Joe Rogan (2:22)

The toilet paper thing, there's an easy fix for this, folks, that's way better. And I hate to do this to plug a sponsor, but it's a good sponsor. There's a sponsor called Tushy, and Tushy makes a bidet attachment that just fits onto a regular toilet and it cleans your butt. They're only 79 bucks. And it's fantastic.

It cleans your butt so much better than just toilet paper, and it cuts your toilet paper consumption down by like 85, 90 percent, because you just need a little bit of toilet paper to pat your butt dry at the end. Do you ever use one of those bidet attachments?

Nicholas Christakis (2:55)

Well, in Greece, they're not uncommon to have bidets. So, of course, I'm familiar with them, but we don't have one here. You should get one.

Joe Rogan (3:04)

You should get one. You should get one.

I'm telling you, it's so much better.

Nicholas Christakis (3:09)

We may. We may, in fact.

Joe Rogan (3:11)

You should.

Nicholas Christakis (3:12)

So, I can't believe we've covered alcohol and bidets already.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

Yeah.

So, let's talk about this. What made you decide to write a book on the current pandemic and the disease?

Nicholas Christakis (3:25)

Well, I mean, for me, it started... I was reading news reports in January about what was happening in China, but I wasn't paying a ton of attention.

And then I have these Chinese colleagues with whom I've been doing research for a long time, and they contacted me in the middle of January. We had been using phone data in China to study how earthquakes, for example, change human social interactions. So, after an earthquake, who do people call? And we could imagine that the first person you call is very important to you, for instance, and so we could use the phone data to study social interactions.

And so we decided to use the phone data to study the pandemic and to study the movement of people through China and how they might carry the virus with them, which started in Wuhan in November sometime.

And then we noticed, or I saw in the data, that on January 24th, the Chinese were so concerned with the virus that they basically detonated a social nuclear weapon and they put 930 million people, almost a billion people, under home confinement starting January 24th.