Speaker 1: We're all doomed. It's Armstrong and Getty extra large, because
Speaker 1: four hours simply isn't enough. This is Armstrong and Getty
Speaker 1: extra Large. Doom is actually the title of the new
Speaker 1: book from Neil Ferguson, Doomed, The Politics of Catastrophe. In
Speaker 1: the opening of his book references a sitcom that I
Speaker 1: don't know as an American, in which one of the characters, apparently,
Speaker 1: no matter what happened, would we say we're all doomed,
Speaker 1: which is alert. I was laughing quietly as you alluded
Speaker 1: to Dad's army. We're doomed. It's a very Scottish thing
Speaker 1: to say, which is part of the reason that I
Speaker 1: gave the book the title doom. But but actually we're
Speaker 1: doomed as a Star Wars line. I hadn't realized this
Speaker 1: until I started researching. We're doomed in popular culture, and
Speaker 1: I think it's a common response when anything goes wrong there.
Speaker 1: There there are those people who think when disaster strikes
Speaker 1: that it's the end of the world, and then there
Speaker 1: are those people who win disaster strikes are like the
Speaker 1: guy on the jacket of the book who's carrying on
Speaker 1: sinking his part as the wildfire rages behind him, And
Speaker 1: I think part part of our problem with with disasters
Speaker 1: is that that we kind of divide into the people
Speaker 1: who who freak out and the people who go into denial. Well,
Speaker 1: we're always pleased when people we admire agree with us.
Speaker 1: It makes us feel better about ourselves. And you seem
Speaker 1: to share our belief that the fixation on the chief
Speaker 1: executive president of the United States, for instance, as as
Speaker 1: some sort of godhead who can ensued fix all problems
Speaker 1: is pretty misplaced, right. Paul Stoy in Warren Peace makes
Speaker 1: fun of the idea that Napoleon was in command of
Speaker 1: the destinies of all Europeans, And as in a Storian,
Speaker 1: I've tended to be skeptical of the idea that it's
Speaker 1: all about one or two great or wicked men. That's
Speaker 1: not because I'm a Marxist his Storian. On the contrary,
Speaker 1: I just think that in truth, the history's complex process,
Speaker 1: and very rarely is the man at the top, and
Speaker 1: it's usually a man in sole charge, especially when disaster strikes.
Speaker 1: So what happened last year was that all those people
Speaker 1: who've had it in for Trump already were given the
Speaker 1: perfect opportunity to say that it was all his fault.
Speaker 1: Jim Fallows wrote a piece in the Atlantic that said,
Speaker 1: when I fly my light aircraft, I'm in charge, so
Speaker 1: if something goes wrong, it's my fault, and the president
Speaker 1: is in the analogous situation. Now, being the president United
Speaker 1: States is not like flying a light aircraft. It really
Speaker 1: is not, because you're in charge of a vast number
Speaker 1: of different agencies and you can't possibly keep an eye
Speaker 1: on every threat the nation faces. In practice, in every
Speaker 1: country when there's a pandemic, there is a bunch of
Speaker 1: people whose job that is. In the US, there's the
Speaker 1: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there's the Department of
Speaker 1: Health and Human Services. They even have a Deputy Secretary
Speaker 1: for preparedness. And the idea that it's the president's job
Speaker 1: to sit there and make calls about making tests available
Speaker 1: for a new coronavirus is is a cartoon version of
Speaker 1: how government works. And I think if we draw the conclusion,
Speaker 1: and I'm afraid that many, many, many people have, we
Speaker 1: draw the conclusion that this was all Sump's fault, that
Speaker 1: we wouldn't have had half a million plus dead if
Speaker 1: it had been Joe Biden, who somehow magically got elected
Speaker 1: a year early. Then we are not going to learn
Speaker 1: anything from this experience, and the next disaster will be
Speaker 1: just as big as the battle. So but I believe
Speaker 1: we talked to you right at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: pandemic and um, and we're talking about how it looks
Speaker 1: like this is going to shape up to be, you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of thing that makes history books for centuries
Speaker 1: to come. Like it's that big of a deal. What
Speaker 1: do you give the world for a grade on reacting
Speaker 1: to this, this this horrible thing that that struck us
Speaker 1: a year ago. Yeah, I'd have to say that the
Speaker 1: f it comes to mind at this point. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know you don't need to take it from me,
Speaker 1: because there's a new report that's just come out the
Speaker 1: Independent Panel, which has I think arrived at somewhat similar
Speaker 1: conclusions to my own, namely that this was an avoidable
Speaker 1: disaster if we had acted the way say the Taiwanese
Speaker 1: and the South Koreans did early, quickly ramping up testing
Speaker 1: and creating contact tracing, isolating people who were infected, we
Speaker 1: did not need to have a global pandemic. And indeed
Speaker 1: Taiwan did not have significant excess mortality at all. I
Speaker 1: think twelve people have died of COVID in Taiwan, and
Speaker 1: they're right next to China. So we know that this
Speaker 1: did not have to be this way. We know that
Speaker 1: we did not have to have more than half a
Speaker 1: million Americans die premature ly. But the problem, I think
Speaker 1: is that that we are seeking simplistic narratives about the
Speaker 1: story which are going to lead us to miss what
Speaker 1: is really amiss, what is really wrong. After all, this
Speaker 1: is not the only disaster that we have handled badly
Speaker 1: in recent times. I don't think you could claim that
Speaker 1: we handle nine eleven brilliantly. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight,
Speaker 1: Invading Iraq doesn't seem like the best possible reaction to
Speaker 1: that crisis. Financial crisis, well, on paper, we were prepared.
Speaker 1: We had all kinds of regulations in place, but that
Speaker 1: was a pretty big debacle. And then on paper we
Speaker 1: were prepared for a pandemic. It was just that maybe
Speaker 1: we've got the wrong sort of pandemic. I don't know
Speaker 1: what the excuse would be, but I think there's a
Speaker 1: pattern here of failure, and I don't think it's always
Speaker 1: been this way, because we have great scientific knowledge. We
Speaker 1: we understand a lot about the disasters that we are
Speaker 1: likely to encounter, but it feels to me as if
Speaker 1: our response has become less competent compared, let's say, with
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, when in the face of the so
Speaker 1: called Asian Flu of nineteen fifty seven, the Eisenhower administration
Speaker 1: was able to cope with the challenge and deal with
Speaker 1: the disruption of excess mortality without shutting the economy me down,
Speaker 1: without letting the deficit explode, without creating all the kinds
Speaker 1: of I think avoidable and costly mistakes that were made
Speaker 1: in I know one of the themes of the book
Speaker 1: is that you you believe we have a what you
Speaker 1: call a middle management problem, a bloated complex bureaucracy problem.
Speaker 1: Tell us more about that. Well, it's, as we were
Speaker 1: saying earlier, very easy just to say this was all
Speaker 1: down to Trump, and I think we've got to avoid
Speaker 1: drawing that conclusion. Not that he didn't make many, many mistakes,
Speaker 1: But in truth, it wasn't because of Trump that CDC
Speaker 1: completely failed to make testing available early in the in
Speaker 1: the pandemic. The c d C folks, first they stopped
Speaker 1: anybody else from developing tests, and then they produced a
Speaker 1: test of their own that didn't work. And I'd love
Speaker 1: to believe the President United States is is busily monitoring
Speaker 1: the activities of laboratories at c d C. But let's
Speaker 1: face it, that's not how this job works. I learned
Speaker 1: a very important lesson from studying another disaster. It was
Speaker 1: actually a smaller disaster in terms of death, but a
Speaker 1: pretty spectacular one in terms of its impact on American imaginations.
Speaker 1: And that was the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger
Speaker 1: shortly after its launch, and a brilliant manner physicist named
Speaker 1: Richard Feynman wrote a book about that. He was involved
Speaker 1: in the inquiry, and in the book he observes that
Speaker 1: the initial impulse of the media was to try and
Speaker 1: pin it on Roll Reagan, to to try to claim that, oh,
Speaker 1: that the Shuffle launch had been rushed because Reagan wanted
Speaker 1: to reference it in a speech, And this was all
Speaker 1: completely made up. The reality was that at NASA, the
Speaker 1: engineers knew that this thing had a one percent, one
Speaker 1: and a hundred chance of blowing up. They knew there
Speaker 1: was a problem, especially at low temperatures. But the bureaucrats
Speaker 1: at NASA decided to change that one and a hundred
Speaker 1: chance to one in a hundred thousand in order not
Speaker 1: to reveal to the people who were backing the Space
Speaker 1: Shuttle program, namely Congress, that there was a significant risk
Speaker 1: of a disaster. Now, I think throughout history we find
Speaker 1: that guy in middle management again and again, inserting the
Speaker 1: point of failure into the chain of command. But we
Speaker 1: always want to blame the person at the top. So
Speaker 1: the Titanic sinks, and it's the owner of the shipping
Speaker 1: line who gets the maximum blame and opprobrium heaped upon him,
Speaker 1: But that is not really the key to the losses
Speaker 1: on the Titanic. And I think in the same way,
Speaker 1: you kind of go through the disasters and you start
Speaker 1: to realize that it's it's rarely the person who's really
Speaker 1: at fault who gets the blame and a disaster, we
Speaker 1: we tend to want to pin the blame on whoever's
Speaker 1: at the top of the chain of command, But disasters
Speaker 1: generally don't really unfold because of major errors at the top.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't just to give another random exact ample,
Speaker 1: it wasn't Winston Churchill's fault that the defense of Singapore
Speaker 1: was completely bungled in World War Two. We can certainly say,
Speaker 1: with Harry Trueman, the buck stops here. Responsibility ultimately lies
Speaker 1: with the president of the prime minister. Sure, but let's
Speaker 1: not tell ourselves a fairy story that if only we'd
Speaker 1: had a different president last year, that had all have
Speaker 1: been fine, because that that seems to me like a
Speaker 1: complete fairy story. Yeah, the example you gave fits with
Speaker 1: the story of the day yesterday when the New York
Speaker 1: Times let us know that the c d C saying
Speaker 1: less than ten percent of transmissions were outdoors when the
Speaker 1: real number was point zero one percent or whatever. It's
Speaker 1: the same sort of thing, crazy crazy, And you know,
Speaker 1: that's a very good example of what was going wrong
Speaker 1: and is still going wrong. It was obvious a year
Speaker 1: ago if you were paying attention to the research that
Speaker 1: was coming out of China and then North ficially where
Speaker 1: the disease first really struck, that it wasn't being transmitted outdoors.
Speaker 1: I mean there were literally no cases out of Wuhan
Speaker 1: of outdoor transmission. And I remember reading this and thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, And so we ignored that for a year
Speaker 1: and introduced a whole range of totally stupid restrictions, of
Speaker 1: which my personal bugbear were the closures of parks and beaches.
Speaker 1: California shut down its public spaces, so not only locked
Speaker 1: people in their homes, but they then prevented them from
Speaker 1: going outdoors. And then, of course you have the mask
Speaker 1: wearing outdoors, which is actually entirely pointless. And this was
Speaker 1: not It's not like we just figured this out. This
Speaker 1: was obvious. It was obviously in March of last year,
Speaker 1: because nobody was getting this virus in outdoor settings. You
Speaker 1: could see already in the spring the super spreader effect
Speaker 1: that basically twent of infected people did, of the spreading,
Speaker 1: you could see already over a year ago that this
Speaker 1: thing disproportionately killed people over the age of sixty five.
Speaker 1: And you could see the places that it's spread. They
Speaker 1: were indoor settings where large numbers of people were fairly
Speaker 1: close together yelling or singing, and so the places that
Speaker 1: you should shut down in a situation like that of
Speaker 1: the restaurants and the bars, and you should certainly not
Speaker 1: be having people go to church. But that stuff was
Speaker 1: that was not difficult to see. I'm not a virologist
Speaker 1: or an epidemiologist. I'm a historian, but I was reading
Speaker 1: the literature as it was coming out because it was
Speaker 1: pretty fascinated by by the fact that we were in
Speaker 1: the midst of an obviously historic disaster. And it is
Speaker 1: mystifying to me that so many public officials whose job
Speaker 1: this was got things as basic as that wrong and
Speaker 1: imposed a set of restrictions in the population that were
Speaker 1: ultimately harmful. It must have been harmful to stop people
Speaker 1: getting outdoors and to confine them indoors when the virus
Speaker 1: is something that spreads indoors. Well, what makes us insane,
Speaker 1: and perhaps you can help us tease out what's going
Speaker 1: on here, is that so many of the the protective
Speaker 1: methods to policies that have been disproved months and months
Speaker 1: ago remain like the masks outdoors. Is that just? Is
Speaker 1: that a fixation on COVID? Is that bureaucracy is not
Speaker 1: at work? Is that bias in favor of the status quo?
Speaker 1: What's going on with that? I think there are two things. One,
Speaker 1: we have a bureaucratic mentality which regards all risk can,
Speaker 1: no matter what the probability is, as unacceptable. And the
Speaker 1: fun of that, if you're a bureaucrat is that you
Speaker 1: can generate endless regulations and then let people get off
Speaker 1: on that to an extent that I think some of
Speaker 1: us find hard to comprehend. But I see this not
Speaker 1: only at the state level, but at the local level,
Speaker 1: the county level, at the campus level, just the kind
Speaker 1: of desire to create regulations for their own sake. I'll
Speaker 1: give you a great example. The swimming pool where I
Speaker 1: take my kids has all kinds of precautions in place,
Speaker 1: and my favorite is the buffer lane. There is a
Speaker 1: lane that is left empty between where kids can swim
Speaker 1: and adults can do lap swimming because of course the
Speaker 1: stars Coby too virus loves to swim in chlorinated water.
Speaker 1: But it really can't swim across. It can only swim it.
Speaker 1: Come on, guys, and my credit to my nine year old.
Speaker 1: He's like, he's nine, he knows as his bullshit, and
Speaker 1: it's like, so he swims into the buffer lane to
Speaker 1: provoke what he calls the COVID police, and the COVID police,
Speaker 1: the poor people who have to enforce these regulations. We
Speaker 1: really come over and tell him to go back into
Speaker 1: into his lane, and they must know it's it's it's
Speaker 1: crap too. So We have a curious phenomenon, which is
Speaker 1: that there are some people who just love regulation and
Speaker 1: they love to control people's lives and it gets them
Speaker 1: out of bed in the morning. And this was their
Speaker 1: permission to regulate our every activity, no matter what the
Speaker 1: sign said. I don't think they paid the slightest attention
Speaker 1: to the signs. It was just like, oh, great, now
Speaker 1: we can create a lane where nobody can swim. The
Speaker 1: other thing that's going on, which I mean, this makes
Speaker 1: me crazy, um, but the other thing that's going on
Speaker 1: is that that we've developed a habit which was not
Speaker 1: always there in the United States and making everything a
Speaker 1: partisan issue and so which wasn't true. Like in the
Speaker 1: vaccines were like, great, we have the vaccine. We we
Speaker 1: were very proud of the facts in the fifties that
Speaker 1: the US was better at developing vaccines and faster at
Speaker 1: making them than anybody else, and was like everybody was
Speaker 1: like into that, and there was no partisan division on
Speaker 1: this issue. We we've allowed public health to become a
Speaker 1: partisan domain, and therefore mask wearing has become a symbol
Speaker 1: of political affiliation. And the masks here in California are
Speaker 1: going to be worn long after we have huge percentages
Speaker 1: of vaccine, and we're going to have a huge percentage
Speaker 1: of people vaccinated around where I live. We probably already do.
Speaker 1: I was told the other day it's actually over in
Speaker 1: my neighborhood and we're going to carry on wearing masks
Speaker 1: point leslie. Not really because we think we have to
Speaker 1: stay protected from a virus that is no longer really around,
Speaker 1: but but because it's a badge. And somebody says to
Speaker 1: me the other day, Oh, I'm wearing the mask because
Speaker 1: I don't want people to think I'm a conservative. Wow. Right,
Speaker 1: A strange times. I know that when I'm not. When
Speaker 1: I go out of the campus without the mask, I
Speaker 1: know that I'm getting the dirty looks. It's like I'm
Speaker 1: wearing a mega exactly. That that makes me depressed because
Speaker 1: it means that we've totally decoupled what we do in
Speaker 1: public health from science. And often it's the people who
Speaker 1: say the science, follow the science who are least interested
Speaker 1: in actual science. Neil Ferguson, it's always a great pleasure.
Speaker 1: We appreciate the time very much, and we hope we
Speaker 1: can talk again soon. I love that, Thanks so much, guys,
Speaker 1: Thank you, he reminded me um uh, we we did
Speaker 1: know going way back that it doesn't transmit outdoors. Remember
Speaker 1: that footage of the beaches around Los Angeles where the
Speaker 1: COVID cops were waiting on the beach for the kayakers
Speaker 1: to come in. Oh, that's right, people alone out at sea.
Speaker 1: We're being arrested, waiting on the beach to arrest him
Speaker 1: when they got there, because you couldn't. Just absolutely ridiculous.
Speaker 1: I like the fact that Neil Ferguson, who's a smart guy,
Speaker 1: gives the world an f in its response to this. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And and the fact that he attributes it. I've been
Speaker 1: reading some of the summaries of the book and the
Speaker 1: chapter headings and that sort of thing. He attributes it
Speaker 1: to essentially bureaucrat ease, the disease of of bureaucratitis, where
Speaker 1: there are just too many small people in small minds
Speaker 1: and egos and protecting the bureaucrat for all policy to
Speaker 1: pass through, and it just it can't. It's like a
Speaker 1: filter that the openings are too small for the particles
Speaker 1: that need to get through, and you just can't have good, effective,
Speaker 1: tie only policy in the system we have. So the
Speaker 1: book we're talking about is doomed the politics of catastrophe.
Speaker 1: You can grab any book the Neil Ferguson's ever written,
Speaker 1: and you'll be better for having picked it up and
Speaker 1: read it. So yeah, here, we're here.