While day time and late night TV talk show hosts figure out how to maintain their production in self-isolation, Joe Rogan has just been doing his usual thing. The lone wolf podcaster is still inviting guests to his podcast man cave, including a few remote conversations. Yesterday’s guest, Lex Fridman, continued the conversation surrounding masks that was first started with guest Eric Weinstein, as we’ve been reporting.

In the episode with Eric Weinstein, the mathematician urged everyone to wear masks, pushing back at the CDC guidelines at the time. The CDC was not advising the general public to wear masks, but since that podcast aired, they’ve changed their tune.

On the website today, the CDC states “In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.” The “new evidence” they are referring to, as they explain, is the fact that “We now know from recent studies that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms (“asymptomatic”) and that even those who eventually develop symptoms (“pre-symptomatic”) can transmit the virus to others before showing symptoms.” We’ve seen reports about asymptomatic people for weeks now, but the CDC has proved slow to act despite the perhaps-obvious benefit one might assume there is from wearing a mask, thus angering people like Weinstein and Fridman.

On the new episode, Fridman, a research scientist at MIT, begins the podcast wearing his own homemade mask, advocating and explaining just how important masks are to slow the spread of the disease.

“Some questions– do homemade masks work? They’re effective for, to prevent me, if I’m infected asymptomatic, from spreading the infection to you. Your mask protects me, my mask protects you. The idea there is not, I’m not creating a wall from the rest of society.” Fridman explains, “There’s a bigger picture, I’m not allowing the infection to spread. Masks allow you to reduce the transmission rate from 1 to below 1, so allowing you to reduce the transmission rate while also allowing you to be in public.”

He adds later, “Masks are required to slow the spread of the infection. We need to get governors, our politicians to wear them. Trump to wear them.” 

Rogan responded, “Well, this is the Boris Johnson question, because that guy, not only was he not wearing masks but he was shaking hands. And now he’s in intensive care. If he dies, that will be the biggest wake up call for everyone. I hope he doesn’t die. God damn, people are so mean over there. I don’t know his policies…But some people hate him.”

The conversation soon turned to the upcoming UFC fight, with Rogan conceding that he has zero information as to where the fight will be taking place, and whether or not he himself will be going to provide his typical colourful commentary.

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“I’m tryna figure out what I’m doing, if I’m going to it or not. I don’t even know if it’s in America. I literally don’t know, as of right now, I have no information,” Rogan told Fridman about the potential UFC on Dana White’s recently acquired private island. Fridman gives his approval for the fight to happen, viewing it as a step needed for society to know that things will go back to normal.

However Rogan added, “There’s no social distancing in a cage fight. If Tony Ferguson is fighting, there’s going to be blood, for sure. Everybody who fights Tony Ferguson looks like they fell off a train.”

The conversation soon diverts to the accessibility of testing, and whether or not it would be feasible to test every person involved in the UFC fight. 

“I have a feeling if someone tested positive they would remove them from the card,” Rogan hypothesizes. “There’s a lot of people that are very upset with it. It’s very controversial,” Rogan adds, concerning the fight. “They don’t want anybody to do anything out of the norm of social distancing and quarantining.”

You can view the full conversation below, in typical Rogan fashion it spans over three hours.

The other day Joe Rogan went viral after a clip circulated from his recent 3-hour podcast with academic intellectual Eric Weinstein. Eric, the brother of Bret Weinstein, an equally well-known figure in the world of online academia, is a mathematician and economist. 

The clip that went viral found Rogan hypothesizing that he would vote for Trump over Biden. However there is a lot more worth unpacking from the long-form conversation, as Weinstein discusses the approach used by the government during this pandemic. In particular, Weinstein takes issues with the way the government is approaching the use of masks, or perhaps better put, the lack thereof, for certain persons that actually need masks the most.

It is an interesting point, and honestly a scary fact to think about, regarding people who work in hospitals and prisons being told they are not allowed to wear masks (!) despite the fact that a mask would definitely help protect anyone from COVID-19. There have been reports as recent as last week that confirm that corrections officers are not allowed to wear a mask, or bring masks into work with them. This fact was echoed in the recent message Taxstone shared on his twitter last week– he confirmed that Riker’s Island corrections officers are not wearing masks or any sort of protective gear at all, risking infection of themselves and the prisoners. At the same time, NPR reports how hospitals are not letting hospital workers wear masks, despite the obvious fact that people in hospitals would need them the most, especially considering that we now know that the more a person is exposed to this virus, the worse their infection often is. The reasoning as to why these hospital workers are not allowed to wear a mask, or bring their own mask, is entirely unclear, and apparently changes every time someone asks. 

“Civil disobedience,” Eric Weinstein urges during the episode. 

“The fact that these people [who work in hospitals and prisons] are told they can’t talk to the press, and they write to me, ‘my mother was asked to do this, my uncle works in the prison, he’s not allowed to wear a mask, I send him a mask, he’s not allowed to bring a mask.’ What the hell is wrong? It is time for these people to resign, and it is time for us to remember that we have the ability to turn over our own government,” Weinstein said in response to the masks protocols being touted across the U.S., and the messaging from the government surrounding masks. 

He continued, “We are so unprepared as a nation, and we have been sold out for so long by our self-appointed leadership class, who nobody wants. That we either remember who we are and how this game is played…This is a pre-war footing. The transmission mechanism is that you have everybody stay in doors, because you’re worried about deaths of accountability– which is, I don’t think they’re worried about the number of deaths, I think they’re worried about deaths that result from triage, and would result in career-ending action. And then, if we all have to stay home while they replenish our supplies, then the economy goes into recession, recession can become depression, depression leads to armed conflict, and armed conflict leads to war– that would be a transmission mechanism, from these stupid masks, to stop something that nobody can handle.”

“It is time to revolt. This leadership class is unworkable,” Weinstein claims.

He added later, “They know that the people who need them [masks] most, have very weird rules. There’s this whole thing about the States versus the federal government, there’s this thing about price gouging. There’s all sorts of things that are stopping this mask thing from being sorted out.”

“Twitter said we will now be removing tweets if you contradict official authoritative health sources. So that’s just what I did: surgeon general is lying, CDC is lying, World Health Organization is lying. Come at me,” Weinstein threatened, getting his rap beef lingo on.

The entire conversation is not fully centered on COVID-19 talk, but it’s heavy within the first hour of the podcast episode. Check out the full episode below.

Robert Kraft arranged for over 1 million N95 masks, used by health workers to protect themselves amid increased exposure to coronavirus, to be sent to the United States from China, using the Patriots jet to fly all the supplies back. As the U.S. experiences major shortages of crucial protective equipment, such as masks and gloves, many public figures are using their money and resources to step in and allete some of these shortages. Patriots owner Robert Kraft is among these people, as he reportedly negotiated with some folks in power around the world to have tons of N95 masks provided to the U.S. Not only that, but Kraft also used the Patriots private jet to pick up the supplies in Shenzhen, China, and bring them back to the States.

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The plane arrived in Shenzhen on Thursday morning (April 2nd), and could only remain grounded for three hours while suited-up workers loaded the equipment onboard. Although the plane was upgraded to bear the extra cargo, Kraft’s initial agreement of 1.7 million masks took up too much space, so the plane ended up only only bringing back the 1.2 million that could fit. Kraft reportedly spent “several million dollars” on the mission, and was thanked by Charlie Baker, the Governor of Massachusetts where the majority of the masks will be sent.

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“No days off,” Baker said. “Thanks to some serious teamwork, Massachusetts is set to receive over 1 million N95 masks for our front-line workers. Huge thanks to the Krafts and several dedicated partners for making this happen.” The plan is for the MA National Guard to deliver the masks to a central stockpile in Marlborough. Due to critical shortages, 300,000 of the masks will be reportedly be delivered to New York.

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“It is an honour for our family to be a part of this humanitarian mission,” said Kraft in a statement. “We knew that purchasing greatly-needed N95 masks and providing the Patriots plane to expedite their delivery to local hospitals would immediately help protect our courageous healthcare professionals. Multiple organizations across the public and private sectors, all of which were in lockstep with Governor Charlie Baker’s visionary leadership, worked together to execute this mission with the purpose of helping save lives. I truly hope that in doing so, we can in some way inspire others to find creative ways to give more in support of our doctors, nurses and first responders. It’s nice to care for those who provide such compassionate care for us.”