Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.
Speaker 2: I'm Nate Silver. My co host Maria Khannikova is off today,
Speaker 2: but we do have a special guest. David Swag is
Speaker 2: a journalist and author, most recently of the book An
Speaker 2: Abundance of Caution, American Schools, The Virus and the Story
Speaker 2: of Bad Decisions. He also writes a substack newsletter, Silent Lunch.
Speaker 2: So welcome David. There are two reasons we're having you
Speaker 2: on today. Why is I really like your book, In fact,
Speaker 2: I endorse it. I blurred the back cover. And the
Speaker 2: other is that it is Risky Business. It is a
Speaker 2: show about making better decisions. That's our tagline, and this
Speaker 2: is the case where a lot of really bad, high
Speaker 2: stakes decisions were made. So welcome, Welcome to the show, David,
Speaker 2: Thanks Nate, and to help you and the audience navigate,
Speaker 2: we are covering quite a bit of territory today. I
Speaker 2: want to kind of situate us at the start of
Speaker 2: the pandemic, which may be a traumatic time frankly for
Speaker 2: a lot of people. I want to talk through the
Speaker 2: notion of cost benefit analysis and go through some terminology there,
Speaker 2: talk about politics, and psychology talk about the model. So
Speaker 2: there's a lot to get to. But I want to
Speaker 2: first just ask, Okay, sometimes you'll hear this more often
Speaker 2: from liberals who may be at made a Interesteff, we
Speaker 2: didn't have the best possible COVID response, But why is
Speaker 2: it important to talk about this? I mean, it's been
Speaker 2: more than more than five years. What's your response to that.
Speaker 1: Well, I'd say I have two responses. One is that
Speaker 1: this was, to my mind, possibly the most important event
Speaker 1: in some regards, you know, as far as infringing on
Speaker 1: personal liberties of American citizens that we've seen in a
Speaker 1: generation or more. And you know, when you compare it
Speaker 1: to other events like I don't know nine to eleven
Speaker 1: or the Iraq War, the amount of analysis and books
Speaker 1: written and scholarly study of those events to me seems
Speaker 1: like there should be that but times ten for this,
Speaker 1: I mean, like the actual impact on every single person
Speaker 1: in the country, and of particular interest to me children,
Speaker 1: to my mind, has not remotely been adequately studied or
Speaker 1: reckoned with one of the prime reasons I wrote my book.
Speaker 1: And the second answer to your question is that, ultimately,
Speaker 1: you know, I think, like any good books should be
Speaker 1: my book is not really about the pandemic. That's the backdrop,
Speaker 1: but hopefully what it's about is indeed to the topic
Speaker 1: of your podcast. It's really, to use a medical word,
Speaker 1: it's an anatomy of decision making, and my whole book
Speaker 1: is interested in how do individuals, how do policymakers, and
Speaker 1: how do we as a society make decisions, particularly when
Speaker 1: we have limited information and in a time of crisis.
Speaker 1: I use the pandemic as a case study or is
Speaker 1: a back to kind of explore these these dynamics in
Speaker 1: our country, where the reader hopefully comes away from the
Speaker 1: book with an understanding about these kind of decision making
Speaker 1: dynamics that can be applied really to any time that's happening,
Speaker 1: not just a sort of retrospective.
Speaker 2: Look, do you think there's some scar tissue where people
Speaker 2: find it traumatizing it because, like so, we just had
Speaker 2: two big books come out about Joe Biden, which is
Speaker 2: a case that in certain ways is parallel where things
Speaker 2: maybe people on the left kind of got wrong right
Speaker 2: directionally speaking, do you think people are traumatized by this
Speaker 2: experience and don't like talking about it?
Speaker 1: Well, I don't just think and I know it because
Speaker 1: many people have told me so. But you know, a
Speaker 1: reaction I've heard many times to the book is someone
Speaker 1: said they wanted to put their fist through a wall
Speaker 1: while they were reading it. Someone else said they cried,
Speaker 1: people are cringing. Someone said they had to read it
Speaker 1: in stages. But with all that said, to my mind,
Speaker 1: this is something that is both a difficult but necessary read.
Speaker 1: So Scar Tiss would be damned.
Speaker 2: So I do want to take us back now five
Speaker 2: plus years roughly. You know, for me, it was kind
Speaker 2: of a crazy time. This is just the climax of
Speaker 2: the Democratic primary campaign. So I'm like flying around like
Speaker 2: New Hampshire and South Carolina and various events, big conference
Speaker 2: in Boston. Increasingly you see every flight, every flight, it's
Speaker 2: a little bit emptier every time. You get a little
Speaker 2: bit more worried about, you know, maybe we shouldn't be
Speaker 2: gathering all these people together. You are in Westchester County, correct,
Speaker 2: which is if people don't know, it's the immediate northern
Speaker 2: suburbs of New York City, stereotypically nice, leafy houses, liberal,
Speaker 2: kind of pro democratic politics, middle class, upper middle class
Speaker 2: depending on the precise community. Right, And you're a dat
Speaker 2: of too Yep, everything you said sounds accurate. I live
Speaker 2: part time in Weschester County two. My mom grew up
Speaker 2: in a town called Crotons, so I can visualize this
Speaker 2: and like, so one might say, it's like not the
Speaker 2: worst place to be in a pandemic, right, It's kind
Speaker 2: of medium density. There tend to be parks and places
Speaker 2: to go jogging. So what's your sense at the very
Speaker 2: start of the pandemic when do you start to worry
Speaker 2: this is going to be severe? How are you behaving?
Speaker 1: Like most people in my area when when things kicked off,
Speaker 1: I listened to the experts. We locked down. I'm a
Speaker 1: little embarrassed to admit we even wiped our groceries when
Speaker 1: they came in. So I did not start out as
Speaker 1: a contrarian on this. I had no political motivations in
Speaker 1: this at all, and I had no reason to disregard
Speaker 1: what we were being told simultaneously. However, within like day
Speaker 1: one of so called remote learning, it was very obvious
Speaker 1: to me that this was not going to work over
Speaker 1: a long period of time. It seemed a reasonable trade
Speaker 1: off initially based on the information we were given, so
Speaker 1: I wasn't disregarding that, but Nevertheless, this still seemed like, whoa,
Speaker 1: how is this going to play out? Because this is
Speaker 1: not working. I had a third grader and a fifth
Speaker 1: grader at the time, and it was just obvious this
Speaker 1: was going to be a disaster, and that really led
Speaker 1: me to start digging into this.
Speaker 2: So when did you have these moments, David where you
Speaker 2: felt like, oh my god, there's not a lot of
Speaker 2: trustworthy information. What were those those inflections?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So, like I said, I sort of had no
Speaker 1: reason initially to disregard what we were being told. But
Speaker 1: my nature, just my disposition is to always be somewhat skeptical,
Speaker 1: and initially I wasn't pursuing this professionally at all. It
Speaker 1: was just sort of my own need to feel informed
Speaker 1: about what was going on. And what changed for me
Speaker 1: was I started realizing the information was getting I started
Speaker 1: emailing infectious disease experts and epidemiologists and others, almost all
Speaker 1: of them in Europe because the ones in the States
Speaker 1: weren't responding or didn't have the information. But I started
Speaker 1: reaching out to people in Europe trying to get more information,
Speaker 1: and I very quickly had this strange feeling. I'm like,
Speaker 1: holy shit, like none of this stuff is really being
Speaker 1: printed in the Times or I'm not seeing this elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And then that's when I was like, all right, maybe
Speaker 1: I need to do something about this. I'm in the media.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like the media is disappointing me. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: then I guess it falls on my shoulders. And I
Speaker 1: was writing another book at the time, obviously totally unrelated
Speaker 1: to the topic. I just couldn't concentrate on anything. All
Speaker 1: I could think about was this insane, you know, circumstance
Speaker 1: that we were in. And then just more specifically, Nate,
Speaker 1: toward the end of April, I was walking with a
Speaker 1: friend of mine on the high school track here in
Speaker 1: my town and we were dutifully separated on like lanes
Speaker 1: one and four, wearing masks most likely. And by the
Speaker 1: end of April, I think it was new cases in
Speaker 1: New York had dropped by something like fifty percent. And
Speaker 1: as you'll recall and everyone else will, you know, we
Speaker 1: were told and the official slogan was fifteen days to
Speaker 1: slow the spread that began in March, and then they
Speaker 1: tacked another thirty days onto that, and you know, and
Speaker 1: there was seemingly, to my mind like there was no
Speaker 1: real debate or pushbackers, just like, oh yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: how we told you fifteen days. Now we're adding another thirty.
Speaker 1: And so the thing is, the reasoning behind the fifteen
Speaker 1: days to slow the spread was we had to prevent
Speaker 1: hospitals from being overwhelmed. And you know how, we were
Speaker 1: shown this this graph of you know, if everyone just
Speaker 1: follows instructions, you'll have this gentle slope, and if you
Speaker 1: don't follow instructions, we'll have this spike and the hospitals
Speaker 1: will be overwhelmed. So by the end of April, cases
Speaker 1: had fallen, new cases had fallen something like fifty percent.
Speaker 1: And I said to my friend, I'm like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: do you think schools are going to open next week?
Speaker 1: You know, I assume, And he's like, what are you
Speaker 1: talking about. I'm like, well, we did it. We flattened
Speaker 1: the curve, man. We we had a very specific goal
Speaker 1: that we were told we needed to achieve. We achieved it.
Speaker 1: We flattened like literally, and and then he was like, dude,
Speaker 1: they're not going back. They're not going back to school,
Speaker 1: and like, still, even though I've retold this story a
Speaker 1: million times and talk about in the book The Hairs
Speaker 1: on the back of my neck still stand up, because that,
Speaker 1: to me was one of the in was like the
Speaker 1: initial moment where I'm like, oh, like, so that's really
Speaker 1: weird that we're in a country where the government told
Speaker 1: us like, here's the thing you need to do, here's
Speaker 1: the goal that we're trying to achieve. Then we achieved
Speaker 1: that goal, but but then they just kept going anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, people forget how much goodwill there was, right, Like,
Speaker 2: so when shit hit the fan, like kind of Rudy
Speaker 2: Gobert Tom Hanks day, Right, I was flying to Kansas City,
Speaker 2: where my partner's father was in hospice cares. So, you know,
Speaker 2: to be in an environment like that, in a kind
Speaker 2: of rural Missouri hospital at a time when this disease
Speaker 2: is getting to spread around the country was I think
Speaker 2: scary for everybody involved. Right, But we wound up staying
Speaker 2: in Kansas City for a month because there's a giant
Speaker 2: red circle around New York City. Of course, there's no
Speaker 2: way to ascertain cases in Kansas City. I call the
Speaker 2: Department of Health in Missouri. They're like, have you been
Speaker 2: to Wuhan, China, Well, then you can't get a COVID
Speaker 2: test kind of thing, right, But then it was that
Speaker 2: question of like, what is the endgame here?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: I remember we had friends over like you. At first
Speaker 2: I was very cautious, remember, like yelling at a stranger
Speaker 2: for not wearing a mask on an elevator and some
Speaker 2: carini ish behavior there, right, But gradually there was kind
Speaker 2: of this thing where you start to I roll and
Speaker 2: group chat and you're like, we can't really not do
Speaker 2: and we don't even have kids, you do, right, we
Speaker 2: can't really stay cooped up for the definite future, right,
Speaker 2: because you could project fotward that like there was no
Speaker 2: there was no plan at all.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that was really important to me,
Speaker 1: and you know what I call like a record scratch
Speaker 1: moment in the book is when at the end of
Speaker 1: April and beginning of May, twenty two countries in Europe
Speaker 1: began reopening their lower schools. So this is not like
Speaker 1: one tiny schoolhouse in the you know, in the countryside
Speaker 1: of you know, Denmark, twenty two countries and this includes
Speaker 1: massive cities like Paris and you know and elsewhere. And
Speaker 1: toward the end of April, the education ministers of the
Speaker 1: EU met or met you know, at least online and
Speaker 1: they said, we've observed no negative consequences of this. They
Speaker 1: met a second time in June and they hade the
Speaker 1: same reaction and that for me, I remember watching the
Speaker 1: video of this and like I just it was like
Speaker 1: a sense of unreality because that is the type of
Speaker 1: thing that should have been splashed across the front pages
Speaker 1: of every newspaper. This should have been you know, crawling
Speaker 1: on the screen on every cable news network. This was
Speaker 1: the news. Ostensibly we were waiting for Europe looked at
Speaker 1: all the same information we had and came to a
Speaker 1: very different conclusion about what was wise, and for them
Speaker 1: was we should open the schools. And it is not
Speaker 1: because Europe controlled the virus, which is like one of
Speaker 1: the false arguments about oh well Europe did that, because
Speaker 1: they know they didn't. I give an analysis within my book.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe on a country level when you look
Speaker 1: at it, but if you look at different you can
Speaker 1: match up city to city, small town to small town,
Speaker 1: and go on and on and on and see that
Speaker 1: in Europe they had cases that were above, that were below,
Speaker 1: and that were around the same. It was all over
Speaker 1: the map, you know, literally and figuratively. So they didn't
Speaker 1: quote control the virus. I think that you know, they
Speaker 1: weren't doing mass mandates across the board, they weren't doing
Speaker 1: distancing across the board of six feet. They didn't have
Speaker 1: have the filters, they didn't have barriers across the board,
Speaker 1: none of this stuff that we were told, and nevertheless
Speaker 1: they said we haven't observed any negative impact. That is
Speaker 1: an extraordinary moment that this was ignored and then if
Speaker 1: it was ever mentioned, was waved away. I ultimately wrote
Speaker 1: about it in June I think that meeting, and you know,
Speaker 1: and I talk about it in my book, but this
Speaker 1: was not covered. Essentially, this was just memory hold. So
Speaker 1: that was one key point, key moment. Another one was
Speaker 1: when the cases had fallen in New York City, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, you know, by the end of April dropped
Speaker 1: something like fifty percent. Another key moment was an article
Speaker 1: that had come out on NPR. Of all places where
Speaker 1: they talked about the where they talked about the daycares
Speaker 1: and the YMCAs, tens of thousands of kids were in
Speaker 1: these programs early on and they observed no real outbreaks
Speaker 1: or no kind of like overt negative impacts of this.
Speaker 1: And then lastly there was the study out of Sweden
Speaker 1: where they never closed the lower schools. And by the way,
Speaker 1: Stockholm is, you know, that's a major city. We had
Speaker 1: like empirical evidence just kind of like screaming at us
Speaker 1: in the face, and it just kept being waved away.
Speaker 1: So those were kind of like three or four really
Speaker 1: important moments quite early in the pandemic when it was
Speaker 1: clear that schools were not driving the pandemic, and indeed,
Speaker 1: tons of studies later on showed how schools by and
Speaker 1: large tended to mirror at most or or be below
Speaker 1: the community rates of infection.
Speaker 2: Do you want to talk a little bit, So, first
Speaker 2: of all, it is an election year. Do you think
Speaker 2: the polarity of this was inevitable? What if Hillary Clinton
Speaker 2: had gotten a few more thousand votes in Wisconsin, Michigan,
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania and Hillary Clinton had been president, do you think
Speaker 2: this would have polarized in reverse?
Speaker 1: You know, it's a counterfactual, so who's to say. But
Speaker 1: I do think, based on all the evidence that I
Speaker 1: describe in my book, it seems impossible to not see
Speaker 1: it that way. That and I you know, and I believe,
Speaker 1: and you can tell me if you disagree, But I
Speaker 1: think I make a pretty strong, like lawyerly persuasive case
Speaker 1: that much of the response in America from the public
Speaker 1: health establishment, from the legacy media, from the broader sort
Speaker 1: of like left wing you know, elites, so to speak,
Speaker 1: was reactionary against Trump and against Republicans. And you know
Speaker 1: that's not just sort of like an opinion. There's all
Speaker 1: sorts of like interesting data on this, and also you know,
Speaker 1: my anecdotal experience of this, you know, and we can
Speaker 1: get into it. You know, there's the countless numbers of
Speaker 1: doctors and others who reached out to me saying that
Speaker 1: they agreed with the stuff I was writing, but they
Speaker 1: were afraid to say so publicly, or they were explicitly
Speaker 1: told they couldn't say so. I don't make this statement
Speaker 1: lightly about the left being reactionary. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people and left weren't even aware that they were
Speaker 1: being reactionary. I don't even know how much they were
Speaker 1: thinking about it. This is what the people from on
Speaker 1: high were telling them. So, you know, we could get
Speaker 1: into it. But it's like most these you know, most
Speaker 1: experts in anyfield have a relatively narrow range of expertise.
Speaker 1: But yet somehow this is slightly tangential to your question.
Speaker 1: But somehow anyone who was a quote epidemiologist, anyone who
Speaker 1: had MD after the name, they all of a sudden
Speaker 1: became experts in like an entire way of living your life,
Speaker 1: an entire sort of societal response.
Speaker 2: I can't I can't resist the bait about the way
Speaker 2: that experts were thrown around and they I mean, first
Speaker 2: of all, sometimes it was just like blatantly exclusionary, where
Speaker 2: if you're you know, like Jay Boicharia who now works
Speaker 2: to the White House, right perfectly what credential expert, but
Speaker 2: he was going against the consensus, so therefore was kind
Speaker 2: of black balls too strong a phrase. He had a
Speaker 2: strong voice and social media and so forth right, but
Speaker 2: like who is an expert when it comes to COVID policy?
Speaker 1: So that's an awesome question, and it's one of the
Speaker 1: to my mind, I think key threads in my book
Speaker 1: where I discussed the idea that only certain people were
Speaker 1: allowed really within the public conversation and within the media
Speaker 1: to weigh in on what we should be doing. There's
Speaker 1: sort of two problems with that. One is that someone
Speaker 1: like Anthony Fauci has a particular at least ostensibly a
Speaker 1: particular expertise within infectious diseases and perhaps how to manage them.
Speaker 1: He does not have an expertise in the values of
Speaker 1: society and in second order effects of non pharmaceutical interventions
Speaker 1: and mitigations that I know, that's like a mouthful, but
Speaker 1: in plain English, he's not an expert on what happens
Speaker 1: to children who when schools are closed and they won't
Speaker 1: be able to graduate, you have kids stuck at home
Speaker 1: with an abusive parent. Because child abuse cases had skyrocketed,
Speaker 1: and by the way, we knew this data as early
Speaker 1: as April of twenty twenty. They already had indications that
Speaker 1: very very bad things were happening to a lot of
Speaker 1: really vulnerable kids. So Anthony Fauci, you know, and others
Speaker 1: sort of like within that lane, have a very specific
Speaker 1: range of knowledge and expertise, and yet they were given
Speaker 1: this mandate really on being the overall sort of director
Speaker 1: of society. And then to make matters worse, Nate, there
Speaker 1: were other people who sort of fashioned themselves as these
Speaker 1: like COVID pundics, who really for much of the population
Speaker 1: dictated how they were supposed to think about what was
Speaker 1: prudent and what was critical or not critical about various
Speaker 1: interventions that we had to be subject to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my model of this right, as you have kind
Speaker 2: of one group of experts that might attempt to predict
Speaker 2: how bad the disease will be, both in terms of
Speaker 2: number of cases and mortality under certain scenarios. You might
Speaker 2: have another group of experts, maybe more economists, who talk
Speaker 2: about what the what the trade offs are, what are
Speaker 2: the consequences of closing schools, And then it's a society's
Speaker 2: job to, in our flawed democratic system way that expert
Speaker 2: evidence and make what our ultimately political decisions. But I
Speaker 2: want to set one thing up, and maybe it's kind
Speaker 2: of an inside baseball question about the reporting of the book,
Speaker 2: But so, why the decision to focus so much on
Speaker 2: schools right? Why that focus?
Speaker 1: I mean, I use schools right as a launch point
Speaker 1: into this sort of larger Obviously I get into a
Speaker 1: lot of mask mandate stuff and all these other interventions
Speaker 1: imposed I would say schools and children in tandem, because
Speaker 1: I'm really concerned about not just the school closures, but
Speaker 1: the broader sort of view of children in society during
Speaker 1: in America and the positioning of them as these sort
Speaker 1: of like silent super spreaders and the interventions that were
Speaker 1: imposed on them in our country in a sort of
Speaker 1: somewhat uniquely aggressive medical culture that we have here, you know,
Speaker 1: where it's like two year olds had to be masked
Speaker 1: in America, whereas in Europe, the ECDC, that's their version
Speaker 1: of the CDC, they didn't even recommend that kids in
Speaker 1: primary school wear masks at all. And you know, the
Speaker 1: World Health Organization they had mask mandate. I think it
Speaker 1: was age six and up. So the fact that just
Speaker 1: just one of the zillion examples, the fact that it
Speaker 1: was like required for two year olds in America to
Speaker 1: wear masks was you know, it was quite unusual and
Speaker 1: worthy of comment. So the reason I mentioned this is
Speaker 1: is to me, the kind of like biggest unforced error
Speaker 1: in America was the long term closure of schools, and
Speaker 1: then secondarily the impositions imposed on children when schools were open. Finally,
Speaker 1: that of all the harms that happened, to my mind,
Speaker 1: this one is, you know, and it's hard to quantify
Speaker 1: this stuff, mate, but this was perhaps the most consequential,
Speaker 1: and if not the most consequential, certainly the most unnecessarily
Speaker 1: harmful of all the interventions that were imposed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to get one. So I guess I'm
Speaker 2: going to ask you an epidemiological question, right. So one
Speaker 2: of the first things that was there very early on
Speaker 2: that this disease was hitting older people exponentially harder than
Speaker 2: younger people, which is not true for all pandemics. So
Speaker 2: can you explain why that was true for this particular coronavirus.
Speaker 1: One of the things that that I'm really interested in
Speaker 1: his narrative formation and you know, and I talk about
Speaker 1: that a lot in the book is like how these
Speaker 1: certain narratives and ideas were formed and then how they
Speaker 1: were enforced. And one of them is even when you
Speaker 1: think about the term novel coronavirus, even the word novel
Speaker 1: adds on an immediate type of association for people. This
Speaker 1: is new, and often with a disease, something that's new
Speaker 1: is going to be particularly scary. Think about the word COVID.
Speaker 1: It's written in all caps. It's different than just like
Speaker 1: the flu, you know, in lowercase. These things, these things matter,
Speaker 1: I think to some extent. And the reality is that
Speaker 1: coronaviruses have been with us for a zillion years. Much
Speaker 1: of the common colds that we get are from coronaviruses.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of literature that shows that SARS Kobe two,
Speaker 1: which causes COVID, you know, the novel coronavirus, that it
Speaker 1: behaved very similarly to way other coronaviruses had behaved. And
Speaker 1: I interviewed this gentleman who's a specialist in actious diseases
Speaker 1: and looking historically from an ethical perspective about how we
Speaker 1: respond to these things, and he kind of went into
Speaker 1: a whole thing with me saying like, look this, He's like,
Speaker 1: this was positioned from the beginning as something that was
Speaker 1: quote unprecedented. He's like, if I can tell you one thing,
Speaker 1: please don't use the word unprecedented. It's not our reaction
Speaker 1: was unprecedented. But having a highly contagious respiratory virus, that's
Speaker 1: old news. And we shouldn't have been surprised that this
Speaker 1: was particularly dangerous to old people. There are old people
Speaker 1: who die every year from just common cold coronaviruses in
Speaker 1: you know, long term care homes. It's very typical, and
Speaker 1: children are largely unscathed. It's like a common cold. So
Speaker 1: unless we were given evidence or shown a reason why
Speaker 1: to think that this should be performing or acting differently,
Speaker 1: we should have gone with what to expect. You know,
Speaker 1: in medicine, there's that expression, if you hear or hoods,
Speaker 1: think of a horse, don't think of a zebra. I
Speaker 1: mean everyone and I talked about this in the book.
Speaker 1: Everyone thought of the zebra, but we should have thought
Speaker 1: of the horse. Whether this came from a lab or not,
Speaker 1: it's still a coronavirus and still largely behaved similarly to
Speaker 1: other coronaviruses, if perhaps more virulent for older people. Though,
Speaker 1: of course.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back after this message. I'm going to
Speaker 2: give you some phrases and you can kind of use
Speaker 2: these as jumping off points. I think these are all
Speaker 2: phrases where there was some degree of ambiguity or maybe
Speaker 2: strategy and how they were employed. But let me start
Speaker 2: with precautionary principle. It's kind of related to the title
Speaker 2: of your book. What does that mean? What should it mean?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I spend a lot of time talking about the
Speaker 1: precautionary principle. I think it's fascinating. I interviewed this scholar
Speaker 1: named Eric Winsburg, who's a philosopher of medicine and particularly
Speaker 1: of ethics in modeling, and we talked a lot about
Speaker 1: the precautionary principle. And one thing I learned from him,
Speaker 1: and that I talk about in the book, is that
Speaker 1: a lot of philosophers don't even believe there's such a
Speaker 1: thing as the precautionary principle, because it's based on an
Speaker 1: assumption that you know how much harm may come to
Speaker 1: you from doing one thing and how much harm you'll
Speaker 1: avoid by doing this other thing that already within the
Speaker 1: beginning of the precautionary principle. It's based on certain assumptions. Now,
Speaker 1: the precautionary principle, as we conventionally understand it, is a
Speaker 1: prudent and reasonable course of action in certain circumstances. But
Speaker 1: those circumstances require a real kind of specific set of
Speaker 1: data or information that you can be certain about, and
Speaker 1: very very quickly within the pandemic, we no longer met
Speaker 1: that specific criteria for the precautionary principle. Certainly so Nate.
Speaker 1: By the end of April beginning of May, if particular,
Speaker 1: if we're thinking about schools, millions of kids twenty two
Speaker 1: countries reopen their schools. At that point, you can no
Speaker 1: longer say that we are keeping schools closed. Here quote
Speaker 1: out of an abundance of caution, you just can't so.
Speaker 1: But this was the sort of like mic drop, It's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm just being cautious. It became very hard for most
Speaker 1: regular people to push back against something when they're like,
Speaker 1: who wouldn't want to be cautious?
Speaker 2: Yeah. There's kind of this effective altruist slash rationalist adjacent
Speaker 2: phrase called Chesterton's fence, which is the idea that if
Speaker 2: you see a fence out in the middle of the wilderness,
Speaker 2: then you probably shouldn't remove it, right, Maybe it's preting
Speaker 2: you from bears or snakes or who knows what, right,
Speaker 2: And that's I think a more coherent version of the
Speaker 2: precautionary principle, or like be wary of uprooting society if
Speaker 2: there might be unknown consequences. But it seemed like, if anything,
Speaker 2: that might be the reverse of it, right.
Speaker 1: Just to kind of dontail with your point there. In medicine,
Speaker 1: everyone knows the cliche of first, do no harm, yea,
Speaker 1: and we reversed that in the pandemic that typically what
Speaker 1: you're supposed to do ethically is you don't act first
Speaker 1: and then try to figure out things you first. You
Speaker 1: know there's a reason why the FDA's you know modo,
Speaker 1: you know, or their mandate is first you have to
Speaker 1: find out if something is safe and effective, then it
Speaker 1: gets approved by the FDA. Yet we did the opposite
Speaker 1: in the pandemic. We had all these interventions because the
Speaker 1: school closure is an intervention. That's not the norm. The
Speaker 1: norm is for kids to be in school, that's the default.
Speaker 1: But we flipped the default. And again there could be
Speaker 1: some argument made for that in you know, March tenth
Speaker 1: of April twenty twenty. But once there was an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of empirical evidence that millions of kids in school
Speaker 1: was not having a catamoclysmic effect. The precautionary principle or
Speaker 1: this quote acting out of an abundance of caution, like
Speaker 1: I titled my book, this was just a complete bastardization
Speaker 1: of what that actual sort of principle is about and
Speaker 1: how it can or should be used.
Speaker 2: The two word phrase quote no evidence. I came to
Speaker 2: be very wary of, right, because you'd read things like, oh,
Speaker 2: there's there's no evidence that children transmit the disease less
Speaker 2: effectively than adults, right when like though the way that
Speaker 2: we used to me, there's like there's no absolute proof, right,
Speaker 2: when there's lots of evidence, right, there might be pulminary studies.
Speaker 2: They're also you know, to use term that our listeners
Speaker 2: will know there are Bayesian priors, right, you know, we
Speaker 2: probably had strong priors to believe that, yes, if you
Speaker 2: got this disease, like almost every other disease, you would
Speaker 2: get some degree of immune protection from that. I mean,
Speaker 2: how did a certain faction manage to wrangle the default
Speaker 2: toward being on their side? How did that become the default?
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it has to do with that.
Speaker 1: We have a very very large degree of homogeneity of
Speaker 1: uniformity within certain very influential institutions in our country, and
Speaker 1: in particular to the pandemic. We think about public health
Speaker 1: and within the legacy media. And the uniformity, there's two
Speaker 1: aspects to it. One is sort of political uniformity that
Speaker 1: both of these kind of institutions tend to lean left
Speaker 1: the people within them. And number two, they also to
Speaker 1: self select for a certain type of person. So you
Speaker 1: have this kind of thing where you had almost everyone
Speaker 1: there on the left in these important institutions in our
Speaker 1: country during the pandemic. And not only were they all
Speaker 1: kind of largely of the same political persuasion, but they
Speaker 1: were also most of them, not all, but most of
Speaker 1: them are of the same type of personality type that
Speaker 1: got to the level of success where they are so
Speaker 1: all that merged together, Nate is it leads to a
Speaker 1: situation where when Donald Trump tweeted in July, schools should
Speaker 1: open in the fall or schools must open in all
Speaker 1: caps or a bunch of exclamation points. That was immediately
Speaker 1: radioactive to a lot of these people, and to whomever
Speaker 1: else it wasn't radioactive. They got the message quickly that
Speaker 1: you cannot agree with Donald Trump on anything. And there
Speaker 1: was such a sort of enforced uniformity within these institutions,
Speaker 1: within public health, and within the media that that's how
Speaker 1: you get to a circumstance where something manifestly crazy is
Speaker 1: accepted by a very large portion of society. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The next phrase I wanted to ask you about, which
Speaker 2: I think a quite complicated phrase actually, is scientific consensus.
Speaker 2: What does that mean? What should it mean?
Speaker 1: Yeah, this was bandied about all the time, and this
Speaker 1: you know, what's nice is your questions here. Everything kind
Speaker 1: of threads together because the idea of a scientific consensus
Speaker 1: was to a large extent, or at least to some
Speaker 1: extent manufactured. Once I started writing some articles that were
Speaker 1: challenging to some of the establishment views, but I was
Speaker 1: writing them in largely kind of legacy media outlets, so
Speaker 1: it's kind of had a different type of impromoter, you know,
Speaker 1: attached to it that people could accept it. I started
Speaker 1: getting emails from people around the country, including a lot
Speaker 1: of doc and including some former CDC and former NIH people,
Speaker 1: and they would say most of them would start off
Speaker 1: something like, thank you so much for this, you know,
Speaker 1: for writing this article. I agree with the points you're
Speaker 1: making in here. This just doesn't seem like it's beneficial
Speaker 1: for schools to be closed. I think it's really harmful.
Speaker 1: I don't see the value in mask mandates on these
Speaker 1: little kids, or barriers on their desks, on and on
Speaker 1: whatever it may be. And then they would say, but
Speaker 1: all of this is off the record.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then the second part of that is some of
Speaker 1: these people were told explicitly by their bosses, you know,
Speaker 1: when we're talking like at you know, some of our
Speaker 1: top university hospitals in the country. There was a particular
Speaker 1: physician who I spoke with who worked in the nick you,
Speaker 1: that's like the the pediatric or pick you pediatric intensive
Speaker 1: care unit. And she had said to this was like
Speaker 1: a small kind of like niche media outlet, so it
Speaker 1: didn't have a big readership. But she had done an
Speaker 1: interview after the vaccine had come out and was available
Speaker 1: then for adolescents, and she said, look in our pick
Speaker 1: you we've had more kids, more patients here from Meyer
Speaker 1: Kurt Artists following the vaccine than we had COVID patients
Speaker 1: in an entire year. Now this was someone I just know,
Speaker 1: this shouldn't matter. She was like very much like a
Speaker 1: lefty democrat, like she had no motivation behind this. She
Speaker 1: was just telling the truth. This is just simply what
Speaker 1: happened in the intensive care unit for pediatrics in her hospital.
Speaker 1: This is what happened. Her boss told her, you are
Speaker 1: never to speak to the media again about this. So
Speaker 1: people need to understand when we are told there's a
Speaker 1: scientific consensus on something, that consensus very much maybe manufactured,
Speaker 1: it's an illusion. So I had people, you know, contacting me,
Speaker 1: you know, because they self censored, or you had people
Speaker 1: like this physician who I just talked about, where they
Speaker 1: were explicitly told not to say things. And then the
Speaker 1: third category, mate, aren't all the experts outside the United States.
Speaker 1: It's quite remarkable when you think about in the modern
Speaker 1: era it was. And I had some sort of joke
Speaker 1: about this in the book. It was as if we had,
Speaker 1: you know, rewound the clock like five hundred years and
Speaker 1: the message from the continent hadn't reached us yet, you know,
Speaker 1: across the Atlantic that like, there were plenty of public
Speaker 1: health experts throughout Europe who viewed what was happening very
Speaker 1: very differently from what was happening here, yet that somehow
Speaker 1: was not included in the consensus. So the idea of
Speaker 1: a consensus is almost always BS, or certainly was during
Speaker 1: the pandemic.
Speaker 2: For the next phrase, this would be the last one.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna give your pick between two, either flatten the
Speaker 2: curve or social distancing.
Speaker 1: Oh god, I'll pick social distancing. You know, I discuss
Speaker 1: it at length in the book. I make a really
Speaker 1: to my find valiant effort to try to track down
Speaker 1: the origin of six feet of distancing. You know, as
Speaker 1: everyone now knows, this was made up. And I would
Speaker 1: just say on that point that I actually don't think
Speaker 1: it's unreasonable to have benchmarks for like behavior, because we
Speaker 1: need something to aim for. It's a bit too vague,
Speaker 1: particularly if you're talking about like schools for example, or
Speaker 1: it's like do your best. You know that's going to
Speaker 1: be interpreted differently and it could lead to a contentious
Speaker 1: and chaotic kind of environment. However, the way that these
Speaker 1: interventions were presented to the public, they were presented with
Speaker 1: such a degree of certainty about like their effectiveness and
Speaker 1: a degree of certainty about the evidence behind them, that
Speaker 1: it led to this perverse situation where you had people,
Speaker 1: you know, I likened it to sort of like a
Speaker 1: master carpenter, you know, the precision you had you know,
Speaker 1: teachers and school janitors with with tape measures of r
Speaker 1: up this is five feet and three quarters. Nope, this
Speaker 1: isn't going to work, and they're measuring down to this
Speaker 1: was madness. There was never anything particular about somewhere between
Speaker 1: five feet and seven feet that made something magical. So
Speaker 1: if they want to create a benchmark, that's okay, But
Speaker 1: then you have to say, look, we don't have strong
Speaker 1: evidence for this being a particularly magical distance, but try
Speaker 1: to aim for it if you can. Here's why we
Speaker 1: think it might be helpful. But you know, the American
Speaker 1: Academy of Pediatrics, early on their initial guidance said, and
Speaker 1: you know that one of the people from the AP
Speaker 1: discussed this in an interview. He had said, look, if
Speaker 1: you can do six feet, great, but if you can't,
Speaker 1: don't worry about it. It's far more important to get
Speaker 1: the kids in school. We don't think there's any real
Speaker 1: good evidence that the benefit of an extra couple of
Speaker 1: feet is going to matter in the scheme of things. That,
Speaker 1: of course, was reversed after Donald Trump's tweet. So we
Speaker 1: had inklings of a reasonable sort of idea about social distancing,
Speaker 1: but those sadly kind of evaporated relatively quickly, and then
Speaker 1: it became this very militant type of idea.
Speaker 2: No, well, some of it is kind of is ritualistic, right.
Speaker 2: I think I heard friends in Mexico that like, using
Speaker 2: ultra violet technologies was kind of this ritual they used, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, in New York City, we would put our
Speaker 2: mask on to walk past the hostess sand in a
Speaker 2: crowded restaurant, right, and then go eating a room full
Speaker 2: of people. Everyone's mouths open, right, So you're reducing their
Speaker 2: risk by zero point on one percent, But like I
Speaker 2: do want to you know, I do want to get
Speaker 2: into a little bit more of the evidence. Well, how
Speaker 2: strong is the evidence on the effect of school closures.
Speaker 2: So you'll see some studies saying it's really bad. See
Speaker 2: another city is saying only sort of bad. Right, But
Speaker 2: what's what's your best review of the evidence.
Speaker 1: Our intuitions, and particularly our intuitions with medical matters are
Speaker 1: often wrong. And I'm sympathetic to the idea of anyone
Speaker 1: which included me in early on, who would think, well,
Speaker 1: of course school closers are going to have some sort
Speaker 1: of benefit. It's a bunch of snotty kids running around
Speaker 1: or teenagers gathering. Of course, that you know intuitively makes sense.
Speaker 1: Other people similarly, well, of course, having like a cloth
Speaker 1: in front of your face strapped on, of course that's
Speaker 1: going to have some sort of benefit. There's this intuitive sense.
Speaker 1: But what I show in the book there's a zillion
Speaker 1: examples throughout history, including recent history, where things that seem
Speaker 1: really obvious, where it's like, well, if course, if kids
Speaker 1: are we're seeing a spike in peanut allergies, well, of
Speaker 1: course we should dial back exposure to peanuts in in
Speaker 1: little kids because that's exactly what the American Academy the
Speaker 1: Pediatrics told us to do, and that was the exact
Speaker 1: wrong advice. It was literally the opposite of what they
Speaker 1: should have done. You know, they said, uh, doctor Spaga,
Speaker 1: you said, you know, put a baby on their stomach,
Speaker 1: that'll prevent sids because they could choke. Wrong, bad advice.
Speaker 1: We should actually do the opposite. There's a zillion things,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you know of of many examples where things
Speaker 1: that seem obvious that they will be beneficial once you
Speaker 1: actually use science, once you actually look at the evidence,
Speaker 1: it turns out, oh my god, this thing that seemed
Speaker 1: to be one way is not so. So the reason
Speaker 1: I mentioned all of this is that you or people
Speaker 1: listening might think, well, of course they had some benefit.
Speaker 1: The reality is they had no benefit any intervention. There's
Speaker 1: this phrase called voltage drop within medicine, which is like
Speaker 1: that they expect when you do something that its impact
Speaker 1: is going to wane over time. People don't comply with
Speaker 1: things that are uncomfortable. Wearing a mask, human beings, you
Speaker 1: tug at them, even if even unconsciously you're pulling on it.
Speaker 1: You do things and also people, even the introverts among
Speaker 1: us were social creatures, and there's cellular phone data that
Speaker 1: I talked about in the book. Even well before they
Speaker 1: started easing restrictions, people started moving around that closing schools
Speaker 1: could have a benefit need for a week or a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks, if done in conjunction with everything else
Speaker 1: being closed. But there is zero evidence that over time,
Speaker 1: having them close over a long period of time was
Speaker 1: going to have any benefit at all, because everyone was
Speaker 1: mixing anyway. And that includes, by the way, not just voluntarily.
Speaker 1: As we know, a significant portion of the country were
Speaker 1: never locked down. These were the people you know in
Speaker 1: the in the slaughterhouses, the cashier in a store, the
Speaker 1: people fixing the electrical lines and so on, and the
Speaker 1: healthcare workers. So a significant portion of our country were
Speaker 1: never even allowed to be locked down. So for all
Speaker 1: of those reasons, it should make sense now to anyone
Speaker 1: listening why extended school closures were never going to be beneficial.
Speaker 1: When you had everyone moving about, and you had adults
Speaker 1: going to restaurants and grabbing a drink at a bar,
Speaker 1: while at the same time you have a healthy kid
Speaker 1: locked in their bedroom for six months or for twelve months,
Speaker 1: it made no sense epidemiologically or ethically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Castinos were open, as I experienced a couple of times.
Speaker 2: I only went after it got vaccinated. I was a
Speaker 2: good boy on that. But I want to kind of
Speaker 2: back up to something we've been kind of dancing around
Speaker 2: a little bit. Why is it so difficult for people
Speaker 2: to accept the notion that we need to do some
Speaker 2: form of cost benefit analysis?
Speaker 1: I mean, this is perhaps, you know, a jaundiced view
Speaker 1: of things, but people like to be told what to do.
Speaker 1: Some portion of people in a certain way, and what
Speaker 1: we saw are at least some people in our country.
Speaker 1: What we saw was this very paternalistic, almost like infantilization
Speaker 1: of the public. You had the equivalent of like a
Speaker 1: mom wagging her finger at a three year old saying
Speaker 1: because I told you so, you know, when they didn't
Speaker 1: provide evidence for something. And that's how much of the
Speaker 1: response was conducted and how people reacted. And most people,
Speaker 1: at least in Blue America went along with this, this
Speaker 1: sort of argument from authority. That they went along And
Speaker 1: I can only surmise that that is because it's just
Speaker 1: a it's just easier, it's less cognitive load on you.
Speaker 1: Then everyone was just kind of externalizing a complex at
Speaker 1: least you know, moral and logistical decision making. They were
Speaker 1: just sort of farming it out to someone else, let
Speaker 1: them decide for me. It's kind of amazing, mate, how
Speaker 1: few people actually dug into the data, actually looked at
Speaker 1: and it didn't even require much digging. This was an
Speaker 1: extraordinary kind of like default to the experts, don't ask
Speaker 1: any questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Look, there are a lot of books about kind
Speaker 2: of when. I mean, if you read Daniel Kneman and
Speaker 2: late now Dan Conman is sticking fast and slow. There's
Speaker 2: like so someone fast sticking, which is more kind of
Speaker 2: intuitive in the system too, thinking that requires more deliberation, right,
Speaker 2: And if any problem required more deliberation, I think it
Speaker 2: would be Covid right, that you have to kind of
Speaker 2: go back almost the first principles and thing through things.
Speaker 2: You know, to the extent people's had intuitions, they were
Speaker 2: often very wrong intuitions, right. I remember Mary de Blasio
Speaker 2: in New York told people we're gonna shut the bars
Speaker 2: down for a while, right, so go out and have
Speaker 2: a big night tonight, right, which is an intuition you
Speaker 2: might have in New York if there's a hurricane coming
Speaker 2: which we've had a couple of hurricanes, right, because there's
Speaker 2: zero threat from the hurricane at one point in time,
Speaker 2: then there's a window where it's threatening, and then hopefully
Speaker 2: it's not too bad. Right. But that's probably the most
Speaker 2: time of most transmission in New York, right. Or I
Speaker 2: think you point out like a lot of people's intuitions
Speaker 2: were based on it being an influenza pandemic and not
Speaker 2: a coronavirus pandemic, which is dramatically different. Effects on how
Speaker 2: transmisfold is in children, for example. And we'll be right
Speaker 2: back after this break. Okay. The models. So I've built
Speaker 2: models in the past. Sometimes I think skepticism of models
Speaker 2: is unwarranted. I think people also have very difficult, very
Speaker 2: difficult time telling from the outside what's a good model
Speaker 2: and what's a bad model. When is a model reliable
Speaker 2: and when is it just garbage in? Garbage out? But
Speaker 2: these COVID bells were not very good, David, Can you
Speaker 2: tell me kind of more about what you learned about them?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Well, you know, as you know, one of my
Speaker 1: chapters is titled Geigo for Garbage and Garbage Out. And
Speaker 1: the models were built upon an enormous kind of pile
Speaker 1: of assumptions, and I started digging into them because I'm curious.
Speaker 1: It was like, how did they come up with this model?
Speaker 1: You know, showing that if you you do X, Y
Speaker 1: and z actions, this will lead to such and such results.
Speaker 1: That's what the models were showing. You said, if you
Speaker 1: follow instructions, then we'll have this amount of case rates
Speaker 1: or this amount of you know, transmission, and if you
Speaker 1: are bad and you don't follow instructions, then it's going
Speaker 1: to be this big spike. And they would show these visualizations.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, how did they figure this stuff out?
Speaker 1: And I started reading some of the papers that went
Speaker 1: along with the models and the methodology, and what I
Speaker 1: always do is, because I'm a crazy person, I always
Speaker 1: look at the citations. I'm like, well, where did they
Speaker 1: get that from? So you see there's like a little
Speaker 1: superscript citation. I see it there, you know, in that notes,
Speaker 1: and I click on it. I'm like, okay, where did
Speaker 1: they get this from? And then it leads me to
Speaker 1: another model. I'm like what, so wait, this models based
Speaker 1: another model. Okay, well where did they get that from?
Speaker 1: So then I'm leading the second model, and then I'm
Speaker 1: looking through and there's claims in there, and then I say, oh,
Speaker 1: that's based on yet more models, And then I likened
Speaker 1: it to this of like a never ending Russian Dolls
Speaker 1: type of thing. It was just models upon models upon
Speaker 1: models and one of them. Ultimately I get to like
Speaker 1: the bottom and I'm reading in like the supplement buried
Speaker 1: in the supplement of a paper where they had a
Speaker 1: claim about transmission in schools as a certain portion of
Speaker 1: overall kind of transmission activity and it was something like
Speaker 1: thirty seven percent, and you go deep in, you know,
Speaker 1: in my mind sort of metaphorically, it's in like six
Speaker 1: point five it says this figure was chosen arbitrarily. Now
Speaker 1: that's like you just are peeling back model upon model
Speaker 1: upon model until finally in the supplement you get to
Speaker 1: like actual data and then you find out that it
Speaker 1: was made up. That's kind of wild.
Speaker 2: What's so tricky about building models is like, yeah, they
Speaker 2: are kind of a definition simplifications, right, and sometimes if
Speaker 2: a point in a model, a data point, is non
Speaker 2: central to the thesis of the model, then it's totally
Speaker 2: fine to estimate, right. It's like, Okay, we could do
Speaker 2: a more rigorous job with this, but it's probably not
Speaker 2: very important. The model is like robust to different specifications
Speaker 2: of this parameter. I'm using technical language here, right, there
Speaker 2: are other times when like it just becomes littally garbage
Speaker 2: in garbage out, where you know, you're just taking that
Speaker 2: arbitrary back of the envelope number, feeding it through a
Speaker 2: bunch of loops, right, and then spinning it back out
Speaker 2: and pretending that you've done like real real science there.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I mean there's the other big
Speaker 2: problem with these models too, is so I call it
Speaker 2: like the kind of like tyranny of the measurable. So
Speaker 2: cases are easy to measure, actually not as easy as
Speaker 2: they might be, because it was hard to find enough
Speaker 2: tests and a lot of cases are you know, asymptomatic
Speaker 2: and things like that, right, but you know, and you
Speaker 2: can always try to make the red arrow on CNN
Speaker 2: go down. Conversely, things like psychological harms of being isolated
Speaker 2: from other people for months at a time are harder
Speaker 2: to measure, you know, I know in baseball analysis, offense
Speaker 2: is much easier to measure than defense in baseball, Right,
Speaker 2: So some of these teams would build teams that hit
Speaker 2: a lot of home runs but were terrible defensively because
Speaker 2: we couldn't measure it well. It turns out as you
Speaker 2: study it more carefully, it is important. So what are
Speaker 2: the psychological harms to people of social isolation?
Speaker 1: Yeah, just before I get to that, just to your
Speaker 1: point about the models is the modelers decide what goes
Speaker 1: in and they can turn those dials whichever way they
Speaker 1: want if the model doesn't put out what they want
Speaker 1: to put it out. And I interviewed some really interesting philosophers,
Speaker 1: Eric Winsburg, who I mentioned before, and a colleague of his,
Speaker 1: Stephanie Harvard, who they study how models are made, in
Speaker 1: the sort of ethical implications of models, and what does
Speaker 1: it say about a society about what goes into the
Speaker 1: models that they do, and what does it say about
Speaker 1: the people who build the models. And it's quite astonishing
Speaker 1: when you think about it that the people who built
Speaker 1: the models are also the people who tended to fare
Speaker 1: really well in the pandemic relative to the rest of
Speaker 1: the country. That's not an accident. So we had models
Speaker 1: dictating how we responded in America, and the models only
Speaker 1: took into account certain factors that were of the most
Speaker 1: interest to the people who are in this kind of
Speaker 1: white collar profession if they were living If the people
Speaker 1: who designed the models for IHME and Imperial College were
Speaker 1: living in a studio apartment in the Bronx with no
Speaker 1: air conditioning and you know, six children in there, maybe
Speaker 1: they would have had an input on there. For school closures,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe they would if they were running a
Speaker 1: little mom and pop business, et cetera, et cetera. So
Speaker 1: all these things that are really important in society now.
Speaker 1: Of course, if anyone's listening, really well, it's not as
Speaker 1: important as death. But that's a false binary to draw,
Speaker 1: and for a whole variety of reasons. We tolerate death
Speaker 1: in a whole variety of ways in our country. For
Speaker 1: because you know, on the highway we can make the
Speaker 1: speed limits thirty five, but we don't because we want
Speaker 1: to get places faster. There's all sorts of things going
Speaker 1: on that they chose not to put these things in
Speaker 1: the models, and one of them. So just kind of
Speaker 1: getting now to your question, there's all sorts of evidence,
Speaker 1: and this is quite obvious. We know this just as
Speaker 1: people that isolation is incredibly damaging. It's also it's physically
Speaker 1: damaging to people. We had people in hospitals, particularly the
Speaker 1: elderly people who were not allowed to see their family.
Speaker 1: We had children. The rates of depression and anxiety and
Speaker 1: of eating disorders both B and I going up, and
Speaker 1: also anorexia going up and bolimia going up. All these
Speaker 1: things were directly tied to isolation and school closures. There
Speaker 1: were people who've said, no, it's just because of the
Speaker 1: pandemic overall, and they were upset. It's just simply not true.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of evidence and I cited in
Speaker 1: my book that directly ties these effects to isolation to
Speaker 1: school closures. It had nothing to do with the broader
Speaker 1: kind of like experience of the pandemic.
Speaker 2: There's this thing called the value of a cistical life,
Speaker 2: which is like from empirical data on how many trade
Speaker 2: offs people are willing to make, and like people have
Speaker 2: well established trade offs for how much they're willing to
Speaker 2: trade off length of life in essence for quality of life.
Speaker 2: It gets complicated when like when I was, you know,
Speaker 2: a pretty dutiful mascuer and indoor crowd avoid before I
Speaker 2: got vaccinated, and I wasn't doing it for me. I
Speaker 2: was doing it for because I would feel guilty as
Speaker 2: fuck if I transmitted COVID right, but at some point
Speaker 2: people it just people's tolerance for it lags. And anyway,
Speaker 2: do you think the models were trying or the modelers
Speaker 2: were trying to scare people?
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I mean it's unequivocal, and we know there's
Speaker 1: more broadly, there are statements, you know, from Fauci saying,
Speaker 1: if you think you're doing too much, that's probably the
Speaker 1: right thing. There's some internal documents in the UK government
Speaker 1: that I cite my book where they talk about specifically
Speaker 1: like exaggerating and scaring people in order to get them
Speaker 1: to comply. There are articles in the New York Times
Speaker 1: that talked about this where they were fairly explicit about
Speaker 1: having people be frightened in order to get them to
Speaker 1: behave in a certain way. Ultimately, people people's experience of
Speaker 1: reality was so divergent from what we were told was
Speaker 1: the risk ratio and what we were told we needed
Speaker 1: to do. At a certain point people just called bullshit.
Speaker 2: I agree. At the same time, I do think COVID
Speaker 2: was in this kind of like messy middle ground, where
Speaker 2: like if it were an order of magnitude more deadly,
Speaker 2: then people would comply on their own and then very
Speaker 2: harsh protocols I think would be rational and justified and
Speaker 2: passed most cost benefit tests. Right. If it were ten
Speaker 2: times less deadly, then it would be you know, the
Speaker 2: seasonal flu basically, and people would just kind of let.
Speaker 1: It pass through.
Speaker 2: We're kind of stuck in the middle, and then there's
Speaker 2: kind of so much data to cherry pick, and you
Speaker 2: kind of are forced to kind of figure things out
Speaker 2: on your own. I think the problem at its core,
Speaker 2: as I describe it in the book, is that it's
Speaker 2: really kind of epistemological, isn't it. And it comes down to, like,
Speaker 2: how do we know it is true? How do we
Speaker 2: think about evidence? And what frustrated me, just endlessly and
Speaker 2: enraged me and fascinated me was and still is the
Speaker 2: fact that the idea of like anyone can cherry pick
Speaker 2: stuff and you can have dueling studies. If I were
Speaker 2: to debate someone tomorrow about school.
Speaker 1: Closures, they could cite twenty studies if they want, then
Speaker 1: I could cite twenty studies that you know, have an
Speaker 1: opposite conclusion. And I spoke to a guy who an
Speaker 1: oncologist who's but he's I don't think he's practicing anymore,
Speaker 1: but he talks to patients about how to think through
Speaker 1: like their treatment and what to do or not and
Speaker 1: how to think about evidence. And I was talking with
Speaker 1: him and I said, you know, I talked about you know,
Speaker 1: the millions of kids in school in Europe and stuff,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, so does that not count though, because
Speaker 1: it's you know, in the hierarchy of evidence, it's not
Speaker 1: a randomized trial. And he was like, David, He's like,
Speaker 1: that's better than a study. He's like, that's just reality.
Speaker 1: Studies always have chosen parameters. And it like was really
Speaker 1: an incredible like moment for me where it was like, right,
Speaker 1: like empirical reality trumps everything. So the idea, like you know,
Speaker 1: you mentioned like, oh, in five years from now, you
Speaker 1: don't want to get into an argument with some and
Speaker 1: again about like what the outcomes are this that or
Speaker 1: the other thing. But it's like, I feel like we
Speaker 1: don't have to. You don't have to look at tons
Speaker 1: of studies. We can, but studies to just by their nature,
Speaker 1: have some degree of subjective parameters, you know, put around them,
Speaker 1: the timing that they run from X day to Y day,
Speaker 1: you know, the inputs, et cetera. But when you just
Speaker 1: look at reality, empirical reality. If millions of kids are
Speaker 1: in school, nothing really happened that, you know. When I
Speaker 1: spoke to this on college is, he's like, that's better.
Speaker 1: That's actually above a randomized trial. We're just observing empirical, empirically,
Speaker 1: something that's true. But instead of looking at that, we
Speaker 1: favored theory, you know, and all of these things well
Speaker 1: we well they didn't say we think, They said we know.
Speaker 1: But implicit in this idea, remember the Swiss cheese model,
Speaker 1: ny where of course, right, So they told us each
Speaker 1: of these interventions was like a slice of Swiss cheese,
Speaker 1: and if you do all of them, hopefully the holes
Speaker 1: won't line up and the little very ons won't get
Speaker 1: you know, won't make it through. But what's the implicit
Speaker 1: message in that? It's that they don't know what works.
Speaker 1: They were already admitting they didn't know which intervention worked.
Speaker 1: Therefore we have to do all of them. But yet
Speaker 1: no evidence was actually accrued to support them, and and
Speaker 1: we had evidence to the opposite that in reality. So
Speaker 1: that to me is the thing that I just find
Speaker 1: endlessly fascinating, you know, and I know you do a
Speaker 1: lot of work on kind of like human nature and
Speaker 1: decision making and stuff like that, like on why and
Speaker 1: how our country, by and large, or at least half
Speaker 1: of it went along with favoring a sort of like
Speaker 1: epistelological model of life that favored theory over evidence.
Speaker 2: What did the contrarians get wrong?
Speaker 1: It's a good question. Well, it depends who you define,
Speaker 1: you know, as a contrarian, and what that means. I
Speaker 1: think some of them overstated harms from the vaccine distills.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen that evidence yet. Maybe it exists and
Speaker 1: it just had have been uncovered. I have not seen
Speaker 1: strong evidence that that they caused the mass harm. You
Speaker 1: know that some people purport them to be causing. I
Speaker 1: think the contrarians. I think people on both sides, but
Speaker 1: including the contraints, perhaps misjudged how to effectively argue for
Speaker 1: their position. I don't know, tell me, maybe I'm missing something.
Speaker 2: I do think there was over optimism among the speed
Speaker 2: with which HERD immunity would be reached. Right. Look, a
Speaker 2: lot of transmission was not being picked up. It was asymptomatic,
Speaker 2: and you'd have these waves and there are complicated patterns
Speaker 2: that you know that every time you feel like you
Speaker 2: kind of got the hang of modeling, them. Then they
Speaker 2: wouldn't quite hold up, right, But like I thought, they're
Speaker 2: you know, there are people that thought, okay, well, actually
Speaker 2: sixty percent of people have already been infected, we think,
Speaker 2: and therefore there's heard immunity, you know, notwithstanding evidence about reinfections.
Speaker 2: You know, kind of I was in, I think the
Speaker 2: little denial about that. Clearly these reinfections were a problem.
Speaker 2: So I need to start wrapping up here. So let
Speaker 2: me kind of let me ask this. Let's say that
Speaker 2: there is a COVID twenty five pandemic, and let's say
Speaker 2: that we know this is going to be have roughly
Speaker 2: the same characteristics as COVID nineteen. For some reason, any
Speaker 2: immunity you had from previous COVID nineteen infections or vaccines
Speaker 2: provide no protection. So we're starting from scratch. How do
Speaker 2: you think the United States would react today?
Speaker 1: It'll be it'll be a nightmare, right, I mean, it
Speaker 1: was just I think the one area where there has
Speaker 1: been a softening though, is certainly on kids in schools.
Speaker 1: That's like the one kind of like the narrative initially
Speaker 1: was we have to do this, we got to protect
Speaker 1: the kids. Then the narrative shifted to well, the kids
Speaker 1: are OK, but we need to protect teachers. And then
Speaker 1: once it became obvious that like that, didn't you know
Speaker 1: that teachers were not at any greater risk than other professionals, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, Sweden had a study on this very
Speaker 1: early that showed this that teachers there were not at
Speaker 1: higher risk than the average professional, and on and on.
Speaker 1: Once once like all that's established, it's like then the
Speaker 1: narrative shifted to which like a year or two into
Speaker 1: the pandemic, it then shifted to, well, this was a
Speaker 1: regrettable decision, but they were building the plane as they
Speaker 1: fly it, you know, as a fog of war. But
Speaker 1: the key part, just to answer your question, is though,
Speaker 1: but the narrative did shift, at least to the extent
Speaker 1: that there was an acknowledgment that this was a mistake.
Speaker 1: They then come up with some you know, very kind
Speaker 1: of like exculpatory reasons for why it was a mistake
Speaker 1: that I think are are convenient and untrue. But the
Speaker 1: fact that this is now acknowledged that it's like even
Speaker 1: in like normy kind of liberal circles, most people I
Speaker 1: think today say like, yeah, that was a mistake. I
Speaker 1: think that suggests that if there's some you know, virus
Speaker 1: that behaves in exactly the same way, that there's going
Speaker 1: to be far far less tolerance for these kind of
Speaker 1: like long term closures and other interventions on kids. Like
Speaker 1: people just aren't going to tolerate it.
Speaker 2: You know. Look, I'm gonna be honest. I think they
Speaker 2: are like a certain number of people who uh might
Speaker 2: be more introverted, right, which is normal, But it felt
Speaker 2: like it felt like people weren't able to extrapolate from
Speaker 2: their situation. Where if you have like a nice home
Speaker 2: in the suburbs and you're someone who loves nothing more
Speaker 2: than like snuggling on the couch with your partner and
Speaker 2: your kids or whatever, right and watching movies, and you
Speaker 2: don't like going out, then maybe this seems good. You
Speaker 2: don't have any more fomo or guilt for like not worse,
Speaker 2: you know, Whereas other people I know where like they're like,
Speaker 2: this is not gonna work for even a week the
Speaker 2: social distancing thing, and are already going to like illicit
Speaker 2: parties in New York, and people vary along those dimensions.
Speaker 2: I'm not even sure what my point.
Speaker 1: Was, but my point is, so I know we're bouncing
Speaker 1: around here but just one more thing, you know, but
Speaker 1: much of this also has to do with class and
Speaker 1: and you know, social and economic class. That regardless of
Speaker 1: whether you're an introvert or not, if you had the
Speaker 1: means of living in a comfortable home and doing your
Speaker 1: work from home and not losing your income, that you
Speaker 1: were just going to experience the pandemic very differently from
Speaker 1: someone who had to leave their home to work, from
Speaker 1: someone who lives in a dump somewhere and you know,
Speaker 1: and their kids are jammed in some tiny apartment with them.
Speaker 1: It's just so it's like it wasn't just about an introversion.
Speaker 1: It's also about class. And this was a remarkably class
Speaker 1: based policies that were put in place during the pandemic
Speaker 1: that dramatically favored those who were comfortable and dramatically escalated
Speaker 1: the harms to the people who to not have those
Speaker 1: same means. I want to talk or close by talking
Speaker 1: about the United States and kind of social solidarity in
Speaker 1: the United States, because look, I am certainly like a
Speaker 1: libertarian leading person by acknowledge that pure libertarianism becomes problematic
Speaker 1: in a pandemic, right, So you could say, for example, okay,
Speaker 1: well if it is a time of high transmission.
Speaker 2: I want to go to a restaurant. The owner wants
Speaker 2: to keep the restaurant open. The waiter and the servers
Speaker 2: want to make money noon tomic income for their families,
Speaker 2: And so what's so bad about that we're all assuming
Speaker 2: the own risk. However, we are also creating a negative
Speaker 2: externality for like people in our community. More broadly, right,
Speaker 2: and these questions become easier to solve when the countries
Speaker 2: are more united, right. I mean, you have a quote
Speaker 2: in the book that you kind of flight at the top.
Speaker 2: All of this is not a book about COVID, It's
Speaker 2: about a country ill equipped to ac sensibly under duress.
Speaker 2: How much of this is about the United States? And
Speaker 2: has that made you more pessimistic about the United States's
Speaker 2: leadership abilities? State capacity is a fancy term for it
Speaker 2: going forward.
Speaker 1: I'm very pessimistic. I'm hoping my vook will act as
Speaker 1: some sort of corrective for people and serve as a
Speaker 1: record and also as a means of thinking through how
Speaker 1: these things happen, which will hopefully act as some degree
Speaker 1: of like a countermeasure. But the reality is, you know,
Speaker 1: when you have this kind of like constellation of all
Speaker 1: these different influential institutions, and through both political and kind
Speaker 1: of like personality inclinations, it created a very bad environment
Speaker 1: with bad incentives for people to be afraid to either
Speaker 1: think critically, or if they were thinking critically, then be
Speaker 1: afraid or told explicitly that they were not allowed to
Speaker 1: go against the purported consensus. Well, it certainly certainly permanently
Speaker 1: shifted my priors as far as kind of how wrong
Speaker 1: the expert consensus can be, and how wrong motivated by
Speaker 1: I think somewhat banal and obvious political motives, how how
Speaker 1: unsubtle the effort to maintain the consensus was. And you
Speaker 1: absolutely would get screamed at if you expressed views that
Speaker 1: were very centrist a and later proved to be mostly
Speaker 1: correct B. But they were very careful about how they
Speaker 1: are drawing, drawing the lines between what was acceptable and
Speaker 1: what and what was not. And I will never forget it,
Speaker 1: but I'm glad we're not going through it anymore.
Speaker 2: So, thank you so much for joining us, David.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me, Nate, it's good to chat with you.
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